Redefining PRoduct ONTOlogy to improve intra and cross-domain interoperability

VEGETTI, MARCELA; LEONE, HORACIO; HENNING, GABRIELA P.

Buenos Aires

Congreso; WCCE11 - 11th World Congress on Chemical Engineering; 2023

Asociación Argentina de Ingenieros Químicos

PRoduct ONTOlogy (PRONTO) is an ontology for the product modeling domain in industrial organizations, able to efficiently handle the representation of products and their structures [1]. PRONTO defines and integrates two hierarchies: (i) the Abstraction Hierarchy, representing families, variants, and products; and (i) the Structural Hierarchy, which allows capturing of Bills of material/chemicals by means of composition and decomposition structures.Since the development of PRONTO, several ontologies that claim to represent the same domain have appeared. This proliferation of ontologies is one of the reasons for lack of success of ontologies in industry [2]. Each community assumes that the proper strategy to solve the problem of semantic interoperability is to create its own ad hoc ontology, thereby recreating the initial problem of data siloes but now at the level of ontology siloes. Several initiatives have emerged to try to solve this problem. One of them is the IOF (Industrial Ontology Foundry), whose goal is the creation of a suite of interoperable ontologies that would serve as a foundation for data interoperability in all manufacturing areas. IOF adopts a single top-level ontology, called Basic Formal Ontology, and it is intended to produce two types of reference ontologies: (i) Domain-Independent Reference Ontologies (DIROs) and (ii) Domain-Specific Reference Ontologies (DSROs). The former covers generic notions that are independent of specific industrial domains, such as time, units of measure and locations. On the contrary, DSROs cover notions that are specific to industrial domains including supply chain, production planning, maintenance, etc. Various parties can extend IOF’s reference ontologies to create sub-domain or application ontologies.After more than 10 years of PRONTO development, and considering the ontology siloes problem, it was necessary to review PRONTO in order to redefine it as an extension of the IOF reference ontologies. Two kinds of activities have been carried out. One refers to the addition of annotation properties to PRONTO concepts using the IOF Annotation Vocabulary, which provides a set of properties for annotating ontologies with metadata; thus, facilitating users and ontology developers understanding. The other one corresponds to the alignment of the PRONTO concepts with the IOF Core ontology as well as to the reuse of the Unit of Measure Ontology (a DIRO proposed by IOF) for representing quantities of PRONTO structural relationships. As a result, a new version of PRONTO has been obtained. It is capable of being harmonized with other ontologies that exist in the industrial domain (examples are provided), avoiding the siloes problem and improving intra and cross-domain interoperability.References 1.Vegetti, M., Leone, H., Henning, P. (2011). PRONTO: An ontology for comprehensive and consistent representation of product information. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 24 (8), 1305-1327.2.Ameri, F., Sormaz, D., Psarommatis, F., Kiritsis, D. (2022) Industrial ontologies for interoperability in agile and resilient manufacturing. International Journal of Production Research, 60(2), 420-441.