  This paper introduces a new ontology for Materials Science Laboratory
Equipment, termed MSLE. A fundamental issue with materials science laboratory
(hereafter lab) equipment in the real world is that scientists work with
various types of equipment with multiple specifications. For example, there are
many electron microscopes with different parameters in chemical and physical
labs. A critical development to unify the description is to build an equipment
domain ontology as basic semantic knowledge and to guide the user to work with
the equipment appropriately. Here, we propose to develop a consistent ontology
for equipment, the MSLE ontology. In the MSLE, two main existing ontologies,
the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) and the Material Vocabulary (MatVoc), have
been integrated into the MSLE core to build a coherent ontology. Since various
acronyms and terms have been used for equipment, this paper proposes an
approach to use a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to represent the
hierarchical structure of equipment terms. Equipment terms were collected in
various languages and abbreviations and coded into the MSLE using the SKOS
model. The ontology development was conducted in close collaboration with
domain experts and focused on the large-scale devices for materials
characterization available in our research group. Competency questions are
expected to be addressed through the MSLE ontology. Constraints are modeled in
the Shapes Query Language (SHACL); a prototype is shown and validated to show
the value of the modeling constraints.
