Towards the ontology-based consolidation of production-centric standards

Abstract

Production-centric international standards are intended to serve as an important route towards information sharing across manufacturing decision support systems. As a consequence of the textual-based definitions of the concepts acknowledged within these standards, their inability to fully interoperate becomes an issue, especially since a multitude of standards are required to cover the needs of extensive domains such as manufacturing industries. To help reinforce the current understanding to support the consolidation of production-centric standards for improved information sharing, this article explores the specification of well-defined core concepts that can be used as a basis for capturing tailored semantic definitions. The potentials of two heavyweight ontological approaches, notably Common Logic (CL) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), as candidates for the task are also explored. An important finding regarding these two methods is that while an OWL-based approach shows capabilities towards applications that may require flexible hierarchies of concepts, a CL-based method represents a favoured contender for scoped and facts-driven manufacturing applications.

Keywords:

• ontologies
• manufacturing information systems
• knowledge engineering
• ISO standards
• common logic (CL)
• web ontology language (OWL)

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the EPSRC who fund the majority of our work on Interoperable Manufacturing Knowledge Systems (IMKS) under project 253 of the Loughborough University Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC). We also extend our acknowledgements to Michael Grüninger, from the University of Toronto, for his valuable involvement in this work.