The Road to a Linked Data Paradise—Identifying the Barriers From the Experimentalist's Perspective

The development of the battery interface ontology (BattINFO) for linked battery data promises a paradise of powerful artificial intelligence agents, based on accurate models which avoid hallucinations, enabled by the reuse of a vast amount of interoperable scholarly data. However, there is still a significant gap between the experimental researchers generating that data in the lab and the computational researchers who need ontologically annotated and curated data. In this perspective article, we investigate the current data handling habits of experimentalists and try to build an understanding of the ontological framework from an experimentalist's perspective. We discovered that current practices rely heavily on scattered data and metadata, often saved in various nonstandard Excel spreadsheets. We believe that the key barriers to the broader adoption of linked data practices are the lack of tools which provide an immediate, apparent, and substantial benefit over the use of Excel. We plan to implement a tool consisting of a relational database and an automatic ontology converter and hope that this will serve as a blueprint for encouraging experimentalists to adopt modified workflows which ontologize all battery data created in the future.