This is the sixth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Toshihiro Ashino is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by Japan.

Professor Toshihiro Ashino is mainly continuing research into data and knowledge representation for materials science and engineering. The article of materials ontology in CODATA Data Science Journal 2010 is regarded as an advanced research in current materials informatics area. He is participating a Japanese national project “Materials Integration” and playing an important role to develop materials data and knowledge representation for integrate heterogeneous information resources of the project.

He is also working for standardization of materials data representation, participating a series of CEN workshops, workshop on ‘Economics and Logistics of Standards compliant Schemas and ontologies for Interoperability – Engineering Materials Data’ (WS/ELSSI-EMD, 2009-2010), workshop on ‘Standards for Electronic Reporting in the Engineering Sector’ (WS/SERES, 2012-2014), workshop, ‘FAtigue TEsting DAta’ (WS/FATEDA, 2016-2017) and workshop on ‘MEchanical TEsting DAta’ (WS/METEDA, 2017-2018).

International collaboration for data standards and ontologies are one of the CODATA’s important role and increasing importance for promote open data and open science. He is continuously trying to establish them for materials science and engineering, it will extend CODATA’s activity in this field.

Also, Professor Ashino is working not only in materials science and engineering field, participating JOSS (Japan Open Science Summit) organization committee and RDUF (Research Data Utilization Forum) program committee, working to promote open data and open science activities in Japan. From June 2018, he have been appointed to the chair of CODATA Sub-Committee, International Scientific Data Committee of Science Council of Japan and working to contribute the achievement of CODATA’s objectives.