By KC Morris and Serm Kulvatunyou, Systems Integration
Division, NIST
Ontologies for industrial problems have been a topic of
research for several years. Recently
they are also appearing in activities by consortia groups working on standards. These efforts, though overlapping, have been
disjoint. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a
single place, a foundry, to go to find a community-vetted ontology suitable for
your industrial needs or at least as a starting point for your work? That was exactly the topic of the workshop at
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) last December when a
group of industry, government, and academic researchers met to discuss the possibilities
for such a place.
Per Wikipedia, Ontology in Information Science is “a formal
naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the
entities that exist for a particular domain of discourse.” Generally,
ontologies serve the purpose of mediating the semantics of information between
different applications. An ontology
compartmentalizes the variables needed for computations and establishes the
relationships between them. It is a requirement for problem solving and
analytics in many domains. Nearly all projects in the European Union’s (EU)
Horizon 2020 Factories of the Future program have adopted ontology as a
component. Similarly, in the US NIST’s
smart manufacturing projects also have ontology as a component, and over the
last two decades, NIST has developed several ontologies in manufacturing and
engineering domains.
Existing industrial ontologies serve various overlapping
objectives. Objectives should be coordinated but loosely related to avoid
bottlenecks on independent parallel projects. If the commonality between the ontologies
could be aligned, through something like an ontology foundry, long term
interoperability between the different engineering, manufacturing, and supply
chain disciplines would be better served.
Perhaps more importantly, the development of new ontologies would become
both easier and the results would be more compatible with each other. Value would be gained through a better
ability to leverage the work of others.
The effort of developing an ontology for new areas would be reduced
through the ability to add to already existing work rather than starting anew. New ontologies would become more robust and reliable
by building on existing foundations.
With this idea in mind, NIST organized a workshop to explore
the idea of a framework for curating ontologies—an Industrial Ontologies Foundry
(IOF). The goal for the workshop was to identify
industry needs for an IOF, to develop consensus around the idea and what form
the IOF might take, and to identify the issues that need to be addressed to
move the activity forward. The workshop
with consensus that the IOF idea would be beneficial. Several participants at the workshop expressed
their business drivers, including a very motivational keynote talk by Dominique
Florack, President, Research and Development of Dassault Systèmes. While numerous challenges were identified, two
action groups were formed to begin to address the most challenging of those: 1) the development of scenario-driven
demonstrations to show the value of an IOF and 2) formulation for a business
and governance model. Follow up virtual
meetings are ongoing to work on these issues.
In preparation for the workshop, participants contributed
and reviewed more than 25 existing manufacturing-related ontologies to see what
lessons could be gained from these.
(Other industrial-related ontologies exist and some were presented at
the workshop.) The reviewed ontologies
fell into the following categories:
manufacturing capability modeling, product engineering, supply chain,
materials data, manufacturing engineering, operations, and “other”. An analysis of these ontologies showed two
different approaches to ontology development in the area. The first approach is to formalize the reality. The focus of these efforts is to fully
capture “reality” and tend to be very large in scope. Such efforts are often the product of
visionaries or academic research. While
this approach has the potential for broad impact, many barriers to adoption
exist. The other approach is to engineer
the ontology to the need. These
ontologies have a much narrower scope in that they address a specific business
need and focus on improving a particular capability, functionality or
quality. These ontologies are much more
readily adopted since they typically have a customer in mind during
development; however, they may be much less reusable and the result is a single
point solution.
Participants also reported on the reasons that they are
interested in seeing an industrial ontology foundry. The most reported need was to address
interoperability including tool interoperability, data interoperability, and
interoperability between supply chain partners and their applications. Other drivers were information linking,
formalization of requirements through information constraints, incorporation of
business process aspects, and quality and traceability considerations. Capabilities to address these needs seem
achievable and ontologies would be a good technical approach to addressing
them.
The success of other semantics-based projects suggests that
an Industrial Ontologies Foundry would be both achievable and useful. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry
is one example. The OBO ontologies have
demonstrated significant value in supporting the sharing of biomedical data and
knowledge. In the building and
construction industry the Building Information Model (BIM) with the supporting Industry
Foundation Classes (IFCs) is another example of a widely adopted semantic model
which brought significant value to the industry and have enabled much of the
building automation that is becoming available today. If these successes could be replicated for
industry-related ontologies, the impact would be greater interoperability and better
business intelligence.
If this is an idea that you find intriguing and think it
could help your business, now is your chance to get in on the ground floor of
its development. The project will need
broad and diverse support. It should enable
easier integration of industrial data and better coordination of the activities
across relevant industrial systems. The
Industrial Ontologies Foundry will be the focus of one of the parallel sessions
at the upcoming NIST/OAGi
workshop on Enabling
Composable Service-Oriented Manufacturing Systems April 10 & 11. Come learn more, express your opinions and
offer your insights as to what could make it succeed! If you are interested in participating in the
workshop, please contact one of the session chairs: Dimitris Kiritsis, EPFL, Switzerland, dimitris.kiritsis@epfl.ch or Paul
Witherell, NIST, USA, paul.witherell@nist.gov.
If you don’t want to wait for the
workshop and would like to jump right in and join the weekly conference calls,
please contact Serm Kulvatunyou, NIST, USA, serm@nist.gov.
Related articles from prior workshop:
Boonserm Kulvatunyou, Nenad
Ivezic, K.C. Morris, Simon Frechette: Drilling
down on Smart Manufacturing – enabling composable apps. Manufacturing
Letters 08/2016; 10., DOI:10.1016/j.mfglet.2016.08.004
Nenad Ivezic, Boonserm
Kulvatunyou, Yan Lu, Yunsu Lee, Jaehun Lee, Albert W. Jones, Simon P. Frechette:
OAGi/NIST Workshop on Open Cloud
Architecture for Smart Manufacturing. Report number: NISTIR 8124,
Affiliation: NIST, http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8124
No comments:
Post a Comment