  Crystalline materials, such as metals and semiconductors, nearly always
contain a special defect type called dislocation. This defect decisively
determines many important material properties, e.g., strength, fracture
toughness, or ductility. Over the past years, significant effort has been put
into understanding dislocation behavior across different length scales via
experimental characterization techniques and simulations. This paper introduces
the dislocation ontology (DISO), which defines the concepts and relationships
related to linear defects in crystalline materials. We developed DISO using a
top-down approach in which we start defining the most general concepts in the
dislocation domain and subsequent specialization of them. DISO is published
through a persistent URL following W3C best practices for publishing Linked
Data. Two potential use cases for DISO are presented to illustrate its
usefulness in the dislocation dynamics domain. The evaluation of the ontology
is performed in two directions, evaluating the success of the ontology in
modeling a real-world domain and the richness of the ontology.
