Design of Fundamental Ontology for Manufacturing Product Lifecycle Applications

In today’s world of fast manufacturing, high quality demands and highly competitive markets, it has become vital for companies to be able to extract knowledge from their operating data, to manage and to reuse this knowledge in efficient and automated manner. Ontology has proven to be one of the most successful methods in fulfilling this demand and to this day, it has been applied in number of scenarios within companies of all scales. The most appealing features of the ontology are well-defined structure of the knowledge organization; being machine understandable enables automatic reasoning and inference and finally, well defined semantics enables easy interoperability and design of the plug-in modules. Still, one key downfall of ontology is that it usually has to be manually designed from the beginning for each new use-case. This requires highly specialized knowledge experts working closely with the domain experts for, sometimes, significant period of time. In this paper we propose LinkedDesign solution for described issues, as an example of design of fundamental ontology which can be easily adjusted and adopted for different production systems, thus eliminating the need for repetition of entire design process for every individual company. We also discuss and point to a new and challenging fields of research emerging from application of ontology into manufacturing companies, mainly concerning rapidly growing amounts of knowledge which are beginning to exceed human ability to process it.