The PRIMA Thesaurus for Materials Science and Engineering
Materials science and engineering (MSE) is characterized by heterogeneous workflows, often coupled with limited research data management (RDM) practices. In particular, provenance metadata are often confined within individual electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs), highlighting the need for semantic resources that support findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data, while remaining accessible to nonexperts. The presented Provenance information for materials science (PRIMA) Thesaurus addresses this challenge by providing a structured vocabulary for describing experimental and computational workflows, without relying on complex conceptual models or formal axiomatization. Its development, based on an iterative process involving domain experts, includes requirement analysis across multiple techniques, selection and harmonization of concepts, and alignment with existing community standards. The resulting terminology, structured in a few hierarchical layers, is implemented in Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to ensure flexibility and ease of integration. The applicability of PRIMA as a versatile resource capable of serving diverse scientific disciplines is demonstrated through use cases spanning theoretical and experimental condensed‐matter physics, metrology, surface science, and metallic biomaterial research. These examples illustrate the integration of concepts into various ELNs and metadata schemas, showing how this shared semantic layer supports consistent data description, improves discoverability, and enables cross‐platform interoperability.