Modelling Scientific Processes With the m4i Ontology

We present an approach to document research data in a human and machine readable way by creating JSON-LD metadata files based on the m4i ontology. m4i is based on top level ontologies and reuses concepts of widely accepted ontologies to embed information modelled in m4i in larger contexts like a knowledge graph connecting research data with projects, actors, methods, tools and publications. We use a real-life research example from the engineering domain to show how to describe a research process with its object of research, the different steps with input and output data, the actors, and the used methods and tools. The resulting metadata files can serve as low-threshold documentation in a file system, as an exchange format between tools, as an input for data repositories and as a source of information to be used by scripts and tools.