Towards Expressive Ontology-Based Approaches to Manufacturing Knowledge Representation and Sharing

Nitishal Chungoora (1) , Osiris Junior Canciglieri (2) , R I M Young (3)

1 Interdisciplinary Center of Sleep Medicine
2 Laboratory of Automation and Systems
3 Wolfson School of Mech & Man Engineering

The present capability that ontological approaches offer to formally represent and share manufacturing knowledge is dependent on the choice of ontological formalism. Currently, there exists a spectrum of these formalisms which is being subjectively exploited across multiple domains in design and manufacture. Hence, there is an important prerequisite to achieve an understanding of which family of formalism strictly enables the expressive capture of semantics in order to progress towards meaningful information and viable knowledge sharing. This paper analyses the relative strengths and weaknesses in employing a "lightweight" ontology versus a "heavyweight" version of the ontology to represent and share knowledge between multiple domains in injection moulding design and manufacture. A pertinent direction, from an ontology perspective, is then exposed as a prescription for the improved capture and dissemination of formal semantics, to support multi-domain knowledge sharing.

Keywords: Physical Sciences

Nitishal Chungoora, Osiris Junior Canciglieri, R I M Young. Towards Expressive Ontology-Based Approaches to Manufacturing Knowledge Representation and Sharing. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2010, 23 (12), pp.1059-1070. ⟨10.1080/0951192X.2010.518976⟩. ⟨hal-00642937⟩