# The Industrial Ontologies Foundry Proof-of-Concept Project

Boonserm (serm) Kulvatunyou, Evan Wallace, Dimitris Kiritsis, Barry Smith, Chris Will

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Boonserm (serm) Kulvatunyou, Evan Wallace, Dimitris Kiritsis, Barry Smith, Chris Will. The Industrial Ontologies Foundry Proof-of-Concept Project. IFIP International Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems (APMS), Aug 2018, Seoul, South Korea. pp.402-409, 10.1007/978-3-319-99707-0_50 . hal-02177875

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# The Industrial Ontologies Foundry Proof-of-Concept Project

Boonserm (Serm) Kulvatunyou¹, Evan Wallace¹,
Dimitris Kiritsis², Barry Smith³, Chris Will⁴

¹Systems Integration Division, National Institute of Standards and Technologies
{serm, evan.wallace}@nist.gov

²EPFL, Switzerland
*dimitris.kiritsis@epfl.ch*

³State University of New York, Buffalo
phismith@buffalo.edu

⁴Dassault Systemes
chris.will@3ds.com

**Abstract.** The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up.

**Keywords:** Smart manufacturing, Industrie 4.0, Ontology, IOF, Industrial Ontologies Foundry

## 1 Introduction

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing [1]. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler; meanwhile, ontology is considered as the next generation standard for connected information. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been disparately developed
with inconsistent principles and viewpoints. Hence, existing industrial ontologies are
incoherent and not suitable for the connected information goal.

With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and
financial domains [2-4], an effort called Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been
formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain [5]. Modern
manufacturing, particularly with today's complex cyber-physical products and materi-
als, however, requires diverse disciplines of engineering, information technology, and
management. This nature makes the scoping and development of coherent ontology for
the industrial manufacturing domain a mountainous challenge. To manage scope and
expectations, the IOF community has devised a proof-of-concept (POC) project with
the aim to prove the viability and values of the endeavor. This paper describes the de-
velopments within the POC project.

The paper first describes the IOF formation, organizational structure, and aims of its subgroups. It then describes the POC process, discusses current results, and finally concludes with future plans.

## 2 IOF Formation and Organization

The first IOF workshop was organized in December 2016 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, USA [6]. Thereafter, the community has had weekly conference calls and yearly workshops [7, 8].

Following the workshop in 2017, the IOF charter has been drafted and became avail-
able on its web site as a community draft [9]. One of the most important messages from
the charter that makes IOF unique from other standard organizations that have pub-
lished engineering ontologies is the intention of the IOF for its ontologies to be freely
open. Although the current charter stops short at indicating a particular intellectual
property licensing agreement, the community recognizes the need for such an encom-
passing ontology to be freely reusable, so that the corresponding information can be
truly connected. The intention of the community has always been gravitating toward
one of the royalty free licenses (e.g., variations of the creative commons licenses [10],
which only require some recognitions).

The charter also outlines goals that include not only publishing the freely available
ontologies, but also providing principles, guidelines, and governance processes such
that a suite of ontology modules can grow in an interoperable fashion. One of the com-
ponents to enable this is the organizational structure of the IOF community.

The community has devised three kinds of committees: a governance board (GB), a
technical oversight board (TOB), and working groups (WGs). There is one GB, one
TOB, and as many WGs as deemed necessary by the community. To ensure interoper-
ability, these boards have overlapping personals as shown in Fig. 1, where each circle
represents the membership of each board.
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1.** IOF organizational structure</figcaption></figure>

The primary role of the GB is to maintain the health and effective operation of the IOF organization. It sets the overall policy and manages legal aspects of the business. The other important role for the GB is to resolve conflicts unresolvable by the TOB.

TOB members are responsible for setting ontology principles and design guidelines used across the WGs. They have an important role to ensure that modules of the IOF ontologies developed by each WG are interoperable and consistent.

Each WG develops an ontology or a suite of ontologies of the IOF ontologies vetted by the TOB. Some WGs may be responsible for developing or adapting cross-cutting, domain independent ontologies such as for time or units of measurement. Fig. 2 shows types of ontologies anticipated within the IOF ontologies. A WGs may exist for the foundation ontology, each of bubbles, or a group of bubbles in the figure. The top two layers reflect specializations of the IOF ontologies for a particular use that may be private or licensed (developing such specializations is considered out of scope for the IOF).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** Architecture of the IOF ontologies [9]</figcaption></figure>

We can observe from Fig. 2 that it is a challenge to establish the scope of each WG, particularly at the Domain Specific Reference Ontologies level as information about a
manufactured product overlaps across its life cycle phases and operational areas in-
volved in development and manufacturing of the product. On the other hand, starting
from bottom up looking at the choices of foundation ontology (e.g., BFO [11], DOLCE
[Error! Reference source not found.] ) and Domain Independent Reference Ontolo-
gies carry a risk of developing something don't meet the requirements of the domain.
To manage such risk and challenge, the IOF community has agreed to start with a proof-
of-concept (POC) project, which set the scope based on a consensus rather than the life
cycle or operation areas of manufacturing and devised both bottom-up and top-down
groups to test the feasibility and values of IOF ontologies. The next section describes
this ongoing activity.

3 IOF POC

The IOF proof-of-concept (POC) project was intended to test the feasibility of IOF goals. Therefore, the objectives of the POC included not only producing a small, initial ontology, but also testing the organizational structure (described above) and producing and testing drafts principles and guidelines.

To set the scope, the POC started by asking for most interested manufacturing-re-
lated terms from the community. To set a very low bar, textual definitions were op-
tional. Terms submitted should have a use case behind them so that a proof-of-value
(POV) can be performed once the ontology is available. Each submission could include
up to 50 terms in virtually any form of structured or unstructured file format. After
collecting all the submissions, 20 terms were to be identified based on the frequencies
of matches across the submissions. Each term has a (synonym) set of closely-matched
terms; therefore, we call the output of this step the top-20 sets.

Getting the top-20 sets

At the time of this writing, 23 submissions were received, some of which went over
the 50-term limit. Submission topic areas included product life cycle management, gen-
eral manufacturing, manufacturing process, material (in the sense of material science),
supply chain management, logistics, shop floor automation, manufacturing resources,
production system engineering and analysis, and additive manufacturing.

To identify the top-20 sets, first submissions were transcribed into a web-based col-
laborative ontology editing tool [Error! Reference source not found.] using a Simple
Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) representation [14]. In a few cases, submis-
sions were provided in an Web Ontology Language (OWL) [15] format. The tool was
able to import these, then SKOS concept assertions were manually added to their class
URIs. In this way, all terms could be mapped using the SKOS *closeMatch* relationship.

This led to the second step, creating a rough mapping. The objective of this mapping
was not to do semantic alignment, but rather to set a scope for the POC. Hence, mappers
were instructed to be quite liberal with their mapping and to not be concerned with the
concept hierarchy. One relative rich submission was copied as a starting point for a
canonical terminology (i.e. the IOFPOC skos:ConceptScheme) for mapping. The mapping task was divided among four individuals who performed the mapping consecutively, and the target for completion was a few weeks.

Even with the rough mapping in mind, it was not a trivial work for the last individual because the canonical grew as unmapped terms were added to it. The last individual reported that the search functionality in the tool became very handy. At the finish, the canonical had over 600 terms. Table 1 below shows the resulting top-20 sets. Due to space limitation, only the terms and counts are shown. Table 2 shows definitions provided for the term set with the most matches. Complete result will be available on the IOF web site [5].

<table><caption>**Table 1.** The top-20 sets of closely matched terms</caption><thead><tr><td></td><td>Term Set</td><td>Count</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>Product, Physical Product, Product Material, Manufactured Product</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>Material, Material Object, Engineered Material</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>Manufacturing Machine, Processor, Machinery, Machine Tool, Machine, Mechanism, Machine, Workstation</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Tool, Tools, Tooling, Manufacturing Tool</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>Assembly, Part, Composition</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>Part, Physical Part, Sub Assembly, Product Component, Component</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>Process, Transformation</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>Supplier, Supplier Provider or Vendor, Material Supplier</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>Transportation Process, Move, Movement, Transfer, Transport, Act of Transportation, Transport</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>Quality, Indicator, General KPI, Quality, Engineering Quality, Physical Quality</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>Requirement, Requirement Specification, Control</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>Assembly Process, Assembly Operation, Technological Pair Positioning, Joining, Act of Assembly</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>Customer, Business Customer</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>Feature, Materials Property, CAD Model Feature</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>15</td><td>Process Plan, Work Instructions, Manufacturing Method, Operation, Process Plan, Manufacturing Process Plan</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>16</td><td>Resource</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>17</td><td>Task, Activity, Operation</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>Design, Design Process</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>19</td><td>Equipment, Machinery</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>20</td><td>Fixture, Work Holder</td><td>5</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>**Table 2.** Textual descriptions for the most frequent set</caption><thead><tr><th>Term</th><th>Textual Description</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Physical Product</td><td>Subclass of spatial region (derived from the class axiom)</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>Product (for manufacturing industry) is a Material Object, manufactured to satisfy a need of the market (e.g. to be sold in order to provide profit and support customers by covering their needs).</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>the output of a manufacturing process</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>a material entity or service that is developed to be sold</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>This is a tangible object manufactured to satisfy a need of the market. For the specific mould maker, common products are: moulds, dies, and high precision parts</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>material and/or service sold to others. Note that in manufacturing enterprises 'product' often refers to a product type or class, which in supply chains may be differentiated by packaging, but 'product' may also refer to a product instance.</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>A goods, idea, method, information, object or service created as a result of a process and serves a need or satisfies a want. It has a combination of tangible and intangible attributes (benefits, features, functions, uses) that a seller offers a buyer for purchase.</td></tr><tr><td>Product Material</td><td>A material entity produced by man or machine, including raw material, parts, semi-finished product, and finished product</td></tr><tr><td>Manufactured Product</td><td>a product that is created via a manufacturing process.</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>A product is the subject of the activity.</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>desired output or by-product of the processes of an enterprise. Note 1 to entry: A product can be an intermediate product, end product, or finished goods from a business perspective. [SOURCE: IEC 62264-1:2013-01, 3.1.27]</td></tr><tr><td>Product</td><td>No definition provided.</td></tr></tbody></table>

Discussion

It can be seen from Table 1 that judging only by the label, the terms in each set are quite semantically close to each other. However, Table 2 demonstrates that each submission in the set gave a variety of definitions; and a few distinct notions (or concepts) may be refactored from the set. All but three of the submissions provided textual definitions; though two of those three provided subsumption hierarchies. Due to the richness of the semantics provided in the submission, the mapping result frequently yielded closely related notions within each set. That is, we observed that notions in the same set were often either close to each other in a subsumption hierarchy, an action or process of another notion in the set, or a mereologically related notion to another notion in the
set. There are however other complex cases where similar terms are used for overlap-
ping notions and similar terms are used for subtly distinct notions. An example of the
former case can be observed in Table 2 where ‘product’ was used exclusively for phys-
ical object, both physical object and service, only desired (or designed) output, and both
desired and undesired (by-product) output. An example of the latter case is ‘material’.
In one notion, it is a chemical composition, while in the other, it is a part, assembled
component, or raw substance (e.g., metal powder) supplied to the manufacturing activ-
ity.

Next step

In the next step, the IOF community is creating a WG to formalize these top-20 sets. Two kinds of WGs are in the plan, top-down and bottom-up. At the time of this writing, a top-down WG has been formed. Its approach is to classify the notions in the top-20 set using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) [11] and conversely to see if BFO needs changes.

The formations of the bottom-up WGs are driven by use cases. At this time, the TOB
is soliciting use cases from the community. With use case information, the TOB will
cluster use cases together to form bottom-up WGs.

Both types of WGs will allow the submitters an opportunity to complete their sub-
missions with detail textual definitions before the WGs proceed. It is expected that each
bottom-up WGs would consider notions beyond the top-20 set. They will take the focal
point at ensuring that the harmonized definitions or ontology in each bottom-up domain
board satisfy their functional requirements and viewpoints. It is unclear at this point
whether each bottom-up WG will produce a more formal definition (or model) such as
class diagram or even an ontology. They will however perform gap analysis between
their notions and the output from the top-down group by classifying their notions with
respect to the top-down view. It is yet to be determined whether the gap analysis will
be performed concurrently across all the bottom-up groups or sequentially. The com-
munity seems excited about what is coming before them.

4 Conclusion and Future Plans

The IOF is a growing community. After a round of inactivity elimination, over 60
participants have registered and are actively involved with representative across all
populous continents except Africa. Both the contingent governance (5 seats) and tech-
nical oversight (12 seats) boards consist of diverse representatives from private com-
panies, research institutes, academia, and standard development organizations. Both
boards have a lot of deliverables lying ahead. The governance board should set up mem-
bership policies, development infrastructure, and intellectual property policy. The tech-
nical oversight board should draft ontology design rules (e.g., naming convention, min-
imal ontological commitment, URIs, versioning) and design principles (e.g., modular-
ity, interaction with existing standards). It is anticipated that the proof-of-concept
(POC) project, which is still ongoing, will be the platform for developing these documents. At the present time there is no fee to participate in the IOF; however, the governance board is tasked with developing a business model to sustain the community given a successful POC. Interested individual are invited to submit a request for participation on the IOF web site.

## Acknowledgement and a Disclaimer

The authors wish to thank all the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) members who have contributed their expertise and content to the founding of IOF and the POC project. Any mention of commercial products is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST

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