An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Ontology (Science)

Increasingly, in data-intensive areas of the life sciences, experimental results are being described in algorithmically useful ways with the help of ontologies. Such ontologies are authored and maintained by scientists to support the retrieval, integration and analysis of their data. The proposition to be defended here is that ontologies of this type – the Gene Ontology (GO) being the most conspicuous example – are a _part of science_. Initial evidence for the truth of this proposition (which some will find self-evident) is the increasing recognition of the importance of empirically-based methods of evaluation to the ontology develop¬ment work being undertaken in support of scientific research. Ontologies created by scientists must, of course, be associated with implementations satisfying the requirements of software engineering. But the ontologies are not themselves engineering artifacts, and to conceive them as such brings grievous consequences. Rather, ontologies such as the GO are in different respects comparable to scientific theories, to scientific databases, and to scientific journal publications. Such a view implies a new conception of what is involved in the author¬ing, maintenance and application of ontologies in scientific contexts, and therewith also a new approach to the evaluation of ontologies and to the training of ontologists

Ontology Summit 2008 Communiqué: Towards an open ontology repository

Each annual Ontology Summit initiative makes a statement appropriate to each Summits theme as part of our general advocacy designed to bring ontology science and engineering into the mainstream. The theme this year is "Towards an Open Ontology Repository". This communiqué represents the joint position of those who were engaged in the year's summit discourse on an Open Ontology Repository (OOR) and of those who endorse below. In this discussion, we have agreed that an "ontology repository is a facility where ontologies and related information artifacts can be stored, retrieved and managed." We believe in the promise of semantic technologies based on logic, databases and the Semantic Web, a Web of exposed data and of interpretations of that data (i.e., of semantics), using common standards. Such technologies enable distinguishable, computable, reusable, and sharable meaning of Web and other artifacts, including data, documents, and services. We also believe that making that vision a reality requires additional supporting resources and these resources should be open, extensible, and provide common services over the ontologies

A model for digital preservation repository risk relationships

The paper introduces the Preserved Object and Repository Risk Ontology (PORRO), a model that relates preservation functionality with associated risks and opportunities for their mitigation. Building on work undertaken in a range of EU and UK funded research projects (including the Digital Curation Centre , DigitalPreservationEurope and DELOS ), this ontology illustrates relationships between fundamental digital library goals and their parameters; associated rights and responsibilities; practical activities and resources involved in their accomplishment; and risks facing digital libraries and their collections. Its purpose is to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of risk causality and to illustrate opportunities for mitigation and avoidance. The ontology reflects evidence accumulated from a series of institutional audits and evaluations, including a specific subset of digital libraries in the DELOS project which led to the definition of a digital library preservation risk profile. Its applicability is intended to be widespread, and its coverage expected to evolve to reflect developments within the community. Attendees will gain an understanding of the model and learn how they can utilize this online resource to inform their own risk management activities

Continuous Improvement Through Knowledge-Guided Analysis in Experience Feedback

Continuous improvement in industrial processes is increasingly a key element of competitiveness for industrial systems. The management of experience feedback in this framework is designed to build, analyze and facilitate the knowledge sharing among problem solving practitioners of an organization in order to improve processes and products achievement. During Problem Solving Processes, the intellectual investment of experts is often considerable and the opportunities for expert knowledge exploitation are numerous: decision making, problem solving under uncertainty, and expert configuration. In this paper, our contribution relates to the structuring of a cognitive experience feedback framework, which allows a flexible exploitation of expert knowledge during Problem Solving Processes and a reuse such collected experience. To that purpose, the proposed approach uses the general principles of root cause analysis for identifying the root causes of problems or events, the conceptual graphs formalism for the semantic conceptualization of the domain vocabulary and the Transferable Belief Model for the fusion of information from different sources. The underlying formal reasoning mechanisms (logic-based semantics) in conceptual graphs enable intelligent information retrieval for the effective exploitation of lessons learned from past projects. An example will illustrate the application of the proposed approach of experience feedback processes formalization in the transport industry sector

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Selecting and structuring semantic resources to support SMEs knowledge communities

Knowledge management intrinsically involves communication and information sharing, which can be strongly affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted. This situation gets worst when complex domains are considered, as it is the case of the Construction Industry domains. The development of ontologies to unify and to put into context the different concepts and terms of the sometimes rather traditional and locally coloured construction industry domains is a necessary step to avoid misinterpretations and inefficient communication. The KNOW-CONSTRUCT project decided, as an approach to this task, to re-use, as far as possible, existing ontologies, classification systems and other semantic resources in order to develop a system that may come to contribute to standards and to the integration, management and reuse of the area specific knowledge via a common knowledge base in order to consolidate and provide access to integrated knowledge, making community emergent knowledge a significant added value. It aims at developing a methodology of common Construction Industry Knowledge (CIK) representation applicable to large sets of SMEs in the construction industry as a basis for the establishment of a knowledge community.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Ontological Approach to Representing the Product Life Cycle

The ability to access and share data is key to optimizing and streamlining any industrial production process. Unfortunately, the manufacturing industry is stymied by a lack of interoperability among the systems by which data are produced and managed, and this is true both within and across organizations. In this paper, we describe our work to address this problem through the creation of a suite of modular ontologies representing the product life cycle and its successive phases, from design to end of life. We call this suite the Product Life Cycle (PLC) Ontologies. The suite extends proximately from The Common Core Ontologies (CCO) used widely in defense and intelligence circles, and ultimately from the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which serves as top level ontology for the CCO and for some 300 further ontologies. The PLC Ontologies were developed together, but they have been factored to cover particular domains such as design, manufacturing processes, and tools. We argue that these ontologies, when used together with standard public domain alignment and browsing tools created within the context of the Semantic Web, may offer a low-cost approach to solving increasingly costly problems of data management in the manufacturing industry