Towards a new vision of PaNET: enhancing reasoning capabilities for better photon and neutron data discovery

The Photon and Neutron Experimental Techniques (PaNET) ontology was released in 2021 as an ontology for two major European research infrastructure communities. It provides a standardized taxonomy of experimental techniques employed across the photon and neutron scientific domain, and is part of a wider effort to apply the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles within the community. Specifically, it is used to enhance the quality of metadata in photon and neutron data catalogue services. However, PaNET currently relies on a manual definition approach, which is time consuming and incomplete. A new structure of PaNET is proposed to address this by including logical frameworks that enable automatic reasoning as opposed to the manual approach in the original ontology, resulting in over a hundred new technique subclass relationships that are currently missing in PaNET. These new relationships, which are evaluated by the PaNET working group and other domain experts, will improve data catalogue searches by connecting users to more relevant datasets, thereby enhancing data discoverability. In addition, the results of this work serve as a validation mechanism for PaNET, as the very process of building the logical frameworks, as well as any incorrect inferences made by the reasoner, has exposed existing issues within the original ontology.