Comparative Study of Approaches for an Ontology of Digital Artifacts

Abstract

Abstract Modern business, engineering, and manufacturing are supported by many software tools. Those tools not only help create new products for customers but also enable delivering them in increasingly shorter time periods. To achieve both, the ability to transfer, exchange, integrate, and analyze digital data among supply chain participants with diverse software tools is needed. Creating that ability, however, requires a higher level of interoperability with support from semantics tools, such as knowledge graphs and ontologies. As many engineering and business tasks involve digital communication, it is important to develop ontologies for digital artifacts of various fidelity levels and various scopes of the product life cycle to enable the required interoperability. There are ontologies associated with the various stages of the product life cycle. Those ontologies have various fidelity levels that correspond to specific lifecycle stages and that enable the required interoperability within those stages, with very few enabling interoperability between the stages. To address those ontology needs, the Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF) has released the first version of its Core ontology. The Core provides a basis to represent information about some digital objects such as plan specification as well as physical objects such as occurrence of a process (that may or may not be proceeding according to the plan). While that is the case, there is still a need for the IOF Core to provide further guidance on how they should be related and how to scale to various types of digital and physical objects. To address the issues of relations between physical and digital objects, this paper provides an overview of approaches from recent literature and efforts by the authors and collaborators. It then illustrates in more detail four approaches that are more aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), on which the IOF Core is based. General and use case specific requirements are used to arrive at our initial observations. Finally, we discuss a plan for further analysis.