An Ontology-Based Approach to Enable Data-Driven Research in the Field of NDT in Civil Engineering

Although measurement data from the civil engineering sector are an important basis for scientific analyses in the field of non-destructive testing (NDT), there is still no uniform representation of these data. An analysis of data sets across different test objects or test types is therefore associated with a high manual effort. Ontologies and the semantic web are technologies already used in numerous intelligent systems such as material cyberinfrastructures or research databases. This contribution demonstrates the application of these technologies to the case of the H-1 nuclear magnetic resonance relaxometry, which is commonly used to characterize water content and porosity distribution in solids. The methodology implemented for this purpose was developed specifically to be applied to materials science (MS) tests. The aim of this paper is to analyze such a methodology from the perspective of data interoperability using ontologies. Three benefits are expected from this approach to the study of the implementation of interoperability in the NDT domain: First, expanding knowledge of how the intrinsic characteristics of the NDT domain determine the application of semantic technologies. Second, to determine which aspects of such an implementation can be improved and in what ways. Finally, the baselines of future research in the field of data integration for NDT are drawn.