Publishing FAIR and machine-actionable reviews in materials science: The case for symbolic knowledge in neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence

Scientific reviews are central to knowledge integration in materials science, yet their key insights remain locked in narrative text and static PDF tables, limiting reuse by humans and machines alike. This article presents a case study in atomic layer deposition and etching (ALD/E) where we publish review tables as FAIR, machine-actionable comparisons in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), turning them into structured, queryable knowledge. Building on this, we contrast symbolic querying over ORKG with large language model-based querying and argue that a curated symbolic layer should remain the backbone of reliable neurosymbolic AI in materials science, with LLMs serving as complementary, symbolically grounded interfaces rather than standalone sources of truth.