The requirements of stakeholders were collected and categorized. In view of designing and implementing new ontologies, main activities were directed towards extending the top-level model/ontology with new ontologies from semiconductor and others domains. These extensions required also alignment and integration activities. Prior to the design of the new ontologies, the existing literature on ontologies for semiconductor manufacturing and more general supply chains was reviewed. Moreover, several interviews with experts in semiconductor supply chains from different companies were conducted.
The SC³ Ontology framework platform provides functionalities related to ontology governance, like the ability to host ontologies and to manage them for further processing and visualizations. Essentially, it provides a customizable tool that realizes a hybrid ontology visualization mode. Furthermore, we have implemented a set of interlinked required platform functionalities. These are an upload mechanism that allows the integration of existing ontologies into the portal. The upload is coupled to a first authorization and authentication infrastructure, that grants only privileged roles access to the uploading functionality.
The key achievements towards evaluation of the industrial platform and the ontology ecosystem are: The Digital Reference has been improved, both its structure and linguistic layer; the Digital Reference has been extended; CO2 ontology implementation can be a possible future link to the automotive industry; the collaborative update process supported by blockchain storage works well and first demonstrators have been proposed. To assure better consistency and readability of the Digital Reference and other ontologies we created Ontology Naming Conventions Best Practices. This document contains basic linguistic rules for ontology creating. Moreover, we worked on the topic of time modelling in ontologies. Also, we discussed versioning tools for the Digital Reference and reviewed open source platform options for the future publishing of ontologies. We started updating Digital Reference weekly, updates are communicated to all consortium members via e-mail and can be discussed during regular team meetings.
In the final reporting period, the Digital Reference ecosystem has become more mature, and its development vision has been improved. First research has been done and we will further work towards the layered and modular architecture in the follow-up project (SC4EU). The collaborative ontology update process has already been adjusted for the new upcoming structure. Moreover, Digital Reference has grown significantly, and several use cases have been proposed. Following highlights were achieved and demonstrated at the final review: ontology curation platform, in-depth evaluation of the developed ontologies, integration of all the different ontologies into the Digital Reference platform, integration of the ontologies into the software engineering framework.
We have presented our SC3 solutions and its implementation in various publications, workshops, webinars, and project external meetings. Extensive video material showing the achievements is available at the project website.
