Data sharing and interoperability in a multi-perspectives environment like industrial value chains are major challenges. Materials and Manufacturing are complex. It comprises understanding of the materials, their characteristics, the processes these undergo during manufacturing and the product and its life cycle. To digitalise the whole process, interoperability between all agents participating in all stages is key. Ontologies are presented as a valuable solution for interoperability and semantic data sharing.
In recent years there has been several promising technical and institutional developments regarding the use of ontology in industry. Still, most industrial ontology development work remains within the realm of academic research and awaits a significant uptake in commercial applications. However, for the reasons, that we described earlier, ontologies are often not themselves interoperable and thus fail to be widely accepted.
Most of time, some ontologies exist to conceptualise the same domain. This make difficult to choose which ontology to use especially that most of them are not interoperable. Consequently, OntoCommons look for intra-domain ontologies harmonisation. In addition, when we manage an industrial value chain, the issues are how to move from a domain ontology to another domain ontology, how to bridge them and how to connect them, so comes the cross-domain ontologies harmonisation.
From OntoCommons perspective, harmonising ontologies, means making them FAIR. It means making them findable and accessible, interoperable form different perspectives such as format, syntax, terminology, semantics, as well as easily to reuse. This harmonisation also intend to make ontologies documented, aligned to top- and mid-level ontologies and making their context explicit. Such harmonisation allows to reach common shared ontologies that can be used by agents collaborating or even co-innovation by supporting industry to work with their value chain partners in the same domain or cross domain and then allow data driven innovation on go forward to the European single market.
To summarise, harmonised ontologies will improve semantic interoperability across industrial domains that will have a major impact on digitalisation of European Industry and strengthen their competitiveness and growth opportunities.
Well-defined domain ontologies will be a cost-effective solution from the economic point of view, by decreasing the cost of information engineering. It will help to reduce development and operational costs by supporting cooperation among experts in different fields, for instance allowing collaborative design through reuse of existing data. This will lead to a multiplier effect of potential applications, related to the digitally-enabled data-driven product and service platforms, and unlock considerable potential for novel applications and services for consumers and citizens.
OntoCommons, is targeting two aspects, ontology engineering (i.e. ontology development) and ontology exploitation. The harmonised ontologies will help ontology engineering activities to not reinvent the wheel, by adopting the harmonised ontologies as a basis to the development of new ontologies.
In addition, adopting the harmonised ontologies directly in the exploitation phase would be highly recommended, because it is a gage of quality and of interoperability. Consequently, data integrator or modeler can reuse the harmonised ontologies to document his/her data and integrate and share them.
