Abstract
Recently, there has been promising technical developments and reporting of specific ontologies for use in industrial domain. Yet, most of the industrial ontology development work remains within the purview of academic research and does not have significant uptake in commercial applications. Lack of semantic interoperability and fully usable ontologies further deepens the chasm between the ontology research and its adoption in the industry. Ontologies are not widely known and used in industry. In contrast, Ontologies have made significant inroads in the Biomedical domain as valuable tools for achieving interoperability of data systems deriving from heterogeneous sources. In this work, we present, a set of principles learned from the successful Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry initiative to guide the design and development of Industry Ontologies Foundry (IOF).
Existing developed ontologies suffer from interoperability. In almost all cases, these ontologies, are developed independently, with no reuse of ontology work from the outside and no attempt to profit from lessons learned in earlier initiatives. Hence, they cannot be exploited as a reference in an industrial large scale.
We advocate that the IOF will advance the issue of interoperability in the industrial domain and the reticence to adhere ontology as a reliable solution for this issue. This reticence is due to the problems that persist in ontology engineering such as building methodologies, reusability, integration, etc. as well as costs and dependability.
In this presentation, we will describe a full-integrated strategy to provide an open ontology framework, called Industry Ontologies Foundry (IOF), involving a suite of principles-based ontologies, which broadly represent a hub-and-spokes model. The hub will contain a small number of reference ontologies that are non-redundant in the sense that they contain no terms in common.
In addition, the standardization and the adherence of the foundry by organizations such as NIST, AFNOR, IFAC, interopVlab, IFIP, etc. will encourage industries to accept ontologies as a trustworthy solution for their interoperability problems.
The presentation will conclude with a demonstration of ontology-based Product-Service System (PSS) applications developed and implemented in the H2020 FoF project FALCON.