Dear colleagues in the MaterialDigital community,
with this third newsletter of the year, we would like to inform you about the latest developments in the initiative. Find out what changes the third funding period will bring, get the latest details on the plenary meeting, and gain insight into the latest progress in the main work areas.
We are looking forward to welcoming you in person at the MaterialDigital General Assembly in Berlin in November.
Enjoy reading!
On October 1, the MaterialDigital platform entered its third funding phase. We look back with gratitude on almost six years of joint work, during which we have provided and continue to provide important impetus for the digital transformation of Materials Science and Engineering together with numerous MaterialDigital projects.
With the start of the new funding phase, the structure and focus of the platform have changed in some respects – but much will continue in its tried and tested form.
A key objective for the coming years is to highlight the industrial added value of digitalization and make it more accessible. This will place even greater emphasis on the transfer of knowledge and technologies from research to industrial applications. In terms of creating a server architecture, however, no further development is envisaged within the PMD, and the focus area previously designated for this purpose is coming to an end.
The new focus area - Material Data-Related Industrial Use Cases - will focus on industrial benefits in the future. The focus will be even more intense than before on product orientation and the transfer of digital approaches into practical applications.
Among other things, issues relating to the digital product passport, sustainability potential along the value chain, and regulatory product requirements will be addressed.
In addition, industrial use cases from the projects are analyzed, consolidated, and prepared for reuse (“industrial reuse”). The aim is to make the concrete added value of digitalization—such as machine readability, traceability, automation, interoperability, and data-driven analyses—visible and applicable.
Another focus is on connecting to existing data room interfaces, such as Catena-X. In addition, company guidelines and best practices are being collected to further promote the exchange of FAIR-designed data in circular value creation networks.
The second focus area, Internal Coordination and Community Interactionn, now consisting of the Executive Office and the Community Team, is dedicated to coordinating the platform's content and organization, public relations, event management, and knowledge transfer.
The latter will be further expanded in the third funding phase: In addition to subject-specific materials, low-threshold formats — such as short explanatory videos on YouTube — will also be used in the future to provide broader access to the topics and results of MaterialDigital. The aim is to preserve the knowledge gained in the long term and make it available to a wider audience.
In addition, the platform's national and international networking will be intensified. Connecting to European digitization initiatives is an important step in creating a powerful materials data space that transcends technical and national boundaries.
The extensive innovations in the focus areas Workflows and IT Architecture and Infrastructure, can be found below in the update from the Workflows working group. You will also find all the news from the focus area Semantic Interoperability in the usual place in the newsletter.
This year's General Assembly will take place in Berlin at the end of November – we are already looking forward to seeing everyone involved in the initiative again!
Registration is still possible until November 5 following this link.
You can still find an overview of the program on the Event Page of the PMD.
Please note the following important deadlines:
We would like to take this opportunity to remind you once again about the evening event on the second day of the General Assembly. We will be heading to BrewDog in Marienpark together for a fun evening of bowling, shuffleboard, a photo booth, pizza, and drinks.
The event can be booked via the DGM Website. Participation costs €36. As spots are limited to 60 participants, we recommend booking early.
For those who have already registered for the General Assembly, it is now possible to book the evening event separately. Even if you have already expressed your interest in the evening event, a binding booking is still required.
All those giving a project talk are requested to bring their presentation to the General Assembly and hand it in at the Service-Desk while registrating. Please submit your contribution by the end of the first day of the event at the latest, so that we can transfer the presentations to the presentation laptops in good time. Thank you for your support!
Poster and demonstrator submissions are still being accepted until November 21, 2025, via the DGM Platform. Please note that only submissions made via the platform are eligible to participate in the poster and demonstrator competition. Please bring printed copies of your posters to the event.
If you have any questions about the General Assembly, please contact info@material-digital.de or community@material-digital.de.
The initial preparations are underway, and the topic of digitalization will once again feature prominently in Topic D: Digital Transformation. Topic coordinators Tilmann Hickel and Chris Eberl from MaterialDigital and NFDI-MatWerk, as well as Martina Zimmermann, NFDI-MatWerk, look forward to receiving your contributions.
Abstract submission is now open and will remain so until January 31, 2026 – so don't forget to submit your contributions.
The MaterialDigital initiative will also be represented with a booth at MSE. Once more right next to our sister initiative NFDI-MatWerk to foster exchange and networking.
We look forward to welcoming you in person in Darmstadt!
From September 14 to 18, 2025, materials scientists from all over Europe gathered at FEMS EUROMAT in Granada. The MaterialDigital platform was once again represented on several levels: Symposium D7, “Digital Materials: Rapid Materials, Experiments, Simulation Workflows, Ontologies, and Interoperability,” was very well attended and gave rise to interesting discussions. In addition, the platform and its affiliated projects contributed to the success of the event with several presentations and posters.
At the initiative's booth, visitors were able to engage directly with the Platform and project representatives, which they did enthusiastically. EUROMAT 2025 has thus demonstrated once again that MaterialDigital is also attracting considerable interest at the European level and provided an excellent opportunity to strengthen the initiative's international visibility.
The project “Mobilizing sustainability in the plastics and recycling industry with CO₂ footprint optimization of packaging plastics through digitalization” officially launched on September 1, 2025. We warmly welcome all project partners to our community!
The kick-off will take place on November 4 and will bring together the eight project partners—including both long-standing partners and new participants. Together, they will use digitalization to optimize the carbon footprint of packaging plastics and promote sustainability along the value chain.
We look forward to working together!
The community team is in the midst of intensive planning for the General Assembly and is looking forward to meeting the MaterialDigital community again in person in Berlin soon. At the same time, with the start of the third funding phase, we are working on structural realignment and expanding the team.
Special thanks go to Katharina Weinberger, who has broken new ground with the end of the second funding phase. For over five years, she has played a decisive role in shaping the MaterialDigital platform as part of the executive office and the community team. We would like to thank her sincerely for her great commitment, her tireless dedication, and her many valuable contributions. We wish her every success, joy, and all the best for her new professional and personal adventures!
The restructuring of the work areas has reduced the developments for the IT infrastructure. The remaining tasks from this area will be transferred to the main work area of workflows. The exchange meetings with the monthly open architecture roundtable will continue to take place. If you are interested, please contact us using the contact form.
At the PMDco Hackathon III, the workflow ontology for semantikon was developed, which had previously used an internal ontology and was therefore not generally interoperable. This development now makes it possible to describe data flows semantically in a format compatible with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The ontology refers to executed workflows, but there are also plans to develop an ontology for workflow recipes. We will present the results at the PMD General Assembly at the end of November. For technical details, please visit this page.
At MADICES III (Machine-actionable Data Interoperability for the Chemical Sciences, October 20–24), the existing interchangeable representation of workflows for SimStack, pyiron, AiiDA, and jobflow was further developed. This gives users the ability to run workflow modules on different platforms without the need for manual conversion. This representation format is also supported by semantikon, which allows semantic information to be extracted automatically. Other discussion rounds at MADICES III that are also important for MaterialDigital, related to the interoperability of data stored in ELN systems and the role of ontologies for this purpose.
The MaterialDigital workflow group is involved in organizing a workshop on the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs). The workshop aims to demonstrate in a practical way how unstructured laboratory data can be converted into structured knowledge representations. Participants must have knowledge of OpenAI API, LangChain, Python, and Git. Interested parties can register via the contact form on the MaterialDigital website.
Work on the PMD Core Ontology (PMDco) is currently continuing at full speed. The goal is to complete and publish the next version during the PMD General Assembly at the end of November 2025. An important step in this direction was the recent PMD Hackathon, where key issues relating to structure, coordination, and documentation were further developed jointly.
As usual, contributions and discussions regarding PMDco are conducted openly in our GitHub-Repository – through Issues and Pull Requests.
From October 13 to 15, 2025, the now well-established PMD Ontology Hackathon took place at BAM in Berlin.
For the third time, the ontology community met at the BAM Library to work together on the further development of the PMD Core Ontology (PMDco 3.0) – the semantic basis in the form of a mid-level framework for materials science and engineering.
The event was attended by members of the PMD core team “Semantic Interoperability,” project partners from the MaterialDigital initiatives, PMD-X projects, and colleagues from BAM, FIZ, IWM, IWT, and KIT.
Various working groups addressed topics such as the modeling of materials and processes, the further development of the MSE glossary, the documentation of ontology and development processes, and the structure and alignment of application ontologies. In addition, a special session was held to introduce beginners to ontology work.
Results: new classes and modeling patterns, coordinated concepts for the future direction of PMDco, and a roadmap for improving documentation and usability (further information).
The event impressively demonstrated how valuable the collaboration within the community is - open, creative, and with a common goal: Semantic Interoperability in Material Digitization. A heartfelt thank you to all participants for their motivation, energy, and commitment!
We look forward to seeing you again at the PMD General Assembly (November 26–28, 2025, also at BAM) – and at the latest at the 4th PMD Semantics Hackathon in Fall 2026, which is already being planned.
We are delighted to welcome new colleagues to the “Semantic Interoperability” team! They will be supporting us in particular with the further development and maintenance of PMD Ontologies and the expansion of semantic interoperability within the MaterialDigital initiatives.
Below, our new team members introduce themselves briefly:
My journey in materials science started when I made a jump from nuclear physics to metallurgy during my bachelor's—best decision ever! While gaining some industry experience alongside my master's, I noticed a peculiar trend in the MSE world: Many material scientists generate a lot of structured data, then practically unstructure it by just publishing their results. Other scientists are desperate for that structured data, yet nobody ever seems to find the right data, or they find it but can't make sense of it, or something is missing… The list goes on! This is exactly where ontologies step in. By giving the MSE domain a unified schema through PMDco, we're following FAIR data principles, enabling smooth data exchange between all industry and research partners. Furthermore, in my current doctoral research, I aim to go one step further and apply Neurosymbolic AI techniques to unravel complex process-structure-property dependencies in soft-magnetic materials by providing the AI with MSE domain knowledge in the form of a knowledge graph. It is an exciting research field, and I am delighted to be part of the PMDco team!
Contact:
Kamilla Zaripova
Meso and Micromechanics
Business Area Component Safety and Lightweight Construction
Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkstoffmechanik IWM
Wöhlerstraße 11 | 79108 Freiburg
kamilla.zaripova@iwm.fraunhofer.de | www.iwm.fraunhofer.de
My bachelor in biomimetics sparked my enthusiasm for materials science, as historically, the development of new materials has had a particularly significant impact on the progress of civilisation. Seemingly simple, everyday objects are often the result of decades of research and optimisation, which currently focus on the sustainable use of resources. After gaining some experience in small-batch production of (natural) fibre-reinforced plastics, I shifted my focus to metals and ceramics in my master's programme. There, the aspect of knowledge generated in research was added to my understanding of sustainable resource use, as much knowledge is published but ultimately remains unstructured. This brought me into contact with the FAIR data principles and ontologies, which have fascinated me ever since. Now, in the DiStEL project, I am responsible for developing the HTO together with colleagues from the pmdco-team and supervising the experimental part of the project on the IWT side.
Contact:
Felix Thonagel | thonagel@iwt-bremen.de
Heat Treatment
Leibniz-Institut für Werkstofforientierte Technologien - IWT
Badgasteiner Str. 3 | 28359 Bremen
I come from over 24 years of engagement with Matter across disciplines — from a B.Sc. in Metallurgy, M.Sc. in Polymers, and PhD in Biomaterials, to a decade of interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues from biology, philosophy, design, cultural studies, architecture, anthropology etc., each bringing their own domain-specific perspective on Matter and contributing to the broader discourse on Active New Materialism. I recently joined the PMD-Ontology Team to look at Matter through a data-science and materials-informatics lens, and to contribute collaboratively to the further development of FAIR MSE data infrastructures.
Contact:
Dr.-Ing. Khashayar Razghandi
Platform MaterialDigital @ BAM
Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung
Division 5.2 Metallic High-Temperature Materials
Unter den Eichen 87 (12 / 105) | 12205 Berlin – Germany
+49 30 8104-3427
khashayar.razghandi@bam.de
We invite you to read the latest publication from the DiStEL Project: - Mining Multimodal Fatigue Data Using Reasoning Foundation Models and Formalized Domain Knowledge.
The special issue “Digitalization in Materials Science and Engineering” is now also available in print. Copies will be available for you to view at the MaterialDigital General Assembly in November.
If you also have publications from your project, please send them to us at community@material-digital.de. We will share them with the community and ensure that your research is visible.
We hope you enjoyed the newsletter—stay in touch with us: follow us on LinkedIn and visit our website to stay up to date.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@material-digital.de or via our direct contact persons.
The PMD team
