COMPARISON OF ONTOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF RELATIONS BETWEEN DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL ARTIFACTS IN MANUFACTURING DOMAIN

Published

August 21, 2023

Author(s)

Dusan Sormaz, Boonserm Kulvatunyou, Milos Drobnjakovic, Saruda Seeharit, Arkopaul Sarkar

Abstract

Modern engineering and manufacturing are supported by many software tools in delivering products to customers in increasingly shorter time scales. The ability to transfer, exchange, integrate, and analyze data among supply chain participants with diverse software tools requires a higher level of interoperability with supports 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. The Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF) has released the first version of its Core ontology which provides a basis to represent information about some digital objects such as plan specification as well as physical objects such as occurrent of a process (may or may not be 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 that end, 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.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference

Conference Dates

August 20-23, 2023

Conference Location

Boston, MA, US

Conference Title

International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

digital twin, digital thread, industrial ontology, digital artifacts

Citation

Sormaz, D. , Kulvatunyou, B. , Drobnjakovic, M. , Seeharit, S. and Sarkar, A. (2023), COMPARISON OF ONTOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF RELATIONS BETWEEN DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL ARTIFACTS IN MANUFACTURING DOMAIN, Proceedings of the ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Boston, MA, US, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936865 (Accessed October 27, 2025)