Interoperability of disparate engineering domain ontologies using Basic Formal Ontology

Journal of Engineering Design 31 (2019)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry proof-of-concept project.Evan Wallace, Dimitris Kiritsis, Barry Smith & Chris Will - 2018 - In Ilkyeong Moon, Gyu M. Lee, Jinwoo Park, Dimitris Kiritsis & Gregor von Cieminski (eds.), Advances in Production Management Systems. Smart Manufacturing for Industry 4.0. IFIP. pp. 402-409.

Analytics

Added to PP
2019-06-14

Downloads
1,049 (#11,408)

6 months
164 (#15,370)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Barry Smith
University at Buffalo

Citations of this work

基于基本形式化本体的本体构建.Robert Arp, Barry Smith & Andrew D. Spear - 2020 - Beijing: People's Medical Publishing House.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Infectious Disease Ontology.Lindsay Grey Cowell & Barry Smith - 2009 - In Infectious Disease Informatics. New York: Springer New York. pp. 373-395.
Basic concepts of formal ontology.Barry Smith - 1998 - In Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. IOS Press. pp. 19-28.

Add more references