Information on BattDB and Battery Ontology

BDF & Standards
1

Hi! I’m new to BDA and saw a great presentation by Gabe on youtube talking about BattDB and the Battery Ontology.

I would like to know;

  1. What is the planned scope for this ontology and BattDB? Is itgoing to be cell-level only focused (eg. defining parameters for cycle test data mostly) or is there a plan to go beyond and defining ontology for battery packs/modules and even systems?
  2. Is there a sample of BattDB at current state to show the structure of it? or a sample of the ontology in use? (I have looked through the github repos and don’t really find it).

thanks!
/Anton

2

Hi Anton,

glad to hear the the word is getting out! I can answer your questions about the ontology and maybe @gabe can say more about BattDB.

  1. The plan is that the BDA ontology is an application ontology that extends the EMMO Battery Domain ontology. So the scope of the application ontology itself is limited to just describing the datasets that are in the scope of BDA. But the EMMO Battery Ontology supports very expansive descriptions of everything from materials composition to packs and systems.

  2. Personally, my vision is that the battery data infrastructure should be a federated system with supported interoperability across different databases. In Europe, we are working on building the Battery Knowledge Base, which is such a system that uses Zenodo for data archiving and scrapes thee ontology metadata into a knowledge graph. That can then be queried by human or machine agents e.g. using SPARQL queries. Here is a relatively recent talk I gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82ddmT5uKFo . Also, a perspective paper: https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cssc.202500458

We are now working on creating some flagship examples and documentation, but it’s not finished yet. Keep an eye on this space and I’ll post some links as they become available.

Best Regards,
Simon

1 Like
3

Thank you, Simon, that was very helpful! I see now that the EMMO BDO is probably where I should start exploring, since my area of interest is more on the system side of things. Your paper looks super interesting, i will read and watch the talk to orient myself a bit more.
Cheers!

1 Like
4

@antonfrisk to view the structure of battdb you can set it up locally or your server. Flyway can setup the schema for you and schemaspy can be used to view the schema. It has tables for module data already, and the new tables can be added as needed.

Let me know if I can answer any other specific questions you have.

Thanks

5

The distinction is that the BDA ontology’s scope is set by the datasets BDA describes, not by the full range of concepts available in EMMO. Pack or system data could fit if it’s in that dataset scope; the broader EMMO ontology provides concepts to describe them. Simon’s reply suggests public examples and documentation aren’t ready yet.

6

A minimal worked example would make the distinction between the broad EMMO ontology and BDA’s dataset scope much easier to evaluate. One dataset with its metadata, links to the relevant ontology terms, and a sample query would show how the pieces fit together, even before the flagship examples are ready.

7

The ontology’s role in the knowledge graph is worth separating from BattDB’s storage structure: metadata can be mapped to shared concepts without requiring every database to store data in the same schema. A useful flagship example would show one dataset end to end, including its BDF files, ontology annotations, and the query used to find it. That would make the federation idea much easier to assess in practice.

8

For a practical first example, one BDA dataset described with the application ontology would show how the terms map to real metadata, and where the broader EMMO battery concepts enter. Until the flagship examples are published, the Zenodo records and the ontology repository may be the best places to check for any existing machine-readable metadata or test files.

9

A small end-to-end example would make the distinction between the two layers much clearer: one dataset record using the BDA application ontology, then links from that record to the relevant EMMO concepts. It could show a cell cycling dataset now, with pack or system entities where applicable, without requiring every BDA dataset to describe the full battery hierarchy. A downloadable example would also answer the question about current structure more directly than ontology files alone.