Michael Gruninger

Ontologies: principles, methods and applications

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations and/or software understanding (i.e. an “ontology”) in a given subject area, can improve such communication, which in turn, can give rise to greater reuse and sharing, inter-operability, and more reliable software. After motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purpose they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, first discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing definitions. We then consider the benefits and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the specification, implementation and evalution of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging field, considering various case studies, software tools for ontology development, key research issues and future prospects.

The Role of Competency Questions in Enterprise Engineering

We present a logical framework for representing activities, states, time, and cost in an enterprise integration architecture. We define ontologies for these concepts in first-order logic and consider the problems of temporal projection and reasoning about the occurrence of actions. We characterize the ontology with the use of competency questions. The ontology must contain a necessary and sufficient set of axioms to represent and solve these questions. These questions not only characterize existing ontologies for enterprise engineering, but also drive the development of new ontologies that are required to solve the competency questions.

An organisation ontology for enterprise modeling: preliminary concepts for linking structure and behaviour

Abstract The paper presents our preliminary exploration into an organisation ontology for the TOVE enterprise model. The ontology puts forward a number of conceptualizations for modeling organisations: activities, agents, roles, positions, goals, communication, authority, commitment. Its primary focus has been in linking structure and behaviour through the concept of empowerment. Empowerment is the right of an organisation agent to perform status changing actions. This linkage is critical to the unification of enterprise models and their executability.

The process specification language (PSL) theory and applications

The PROCESS SPECIFICATION LANGUAGE (PSL) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems, such as scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, work flow, and business-process reengineering. We give an overview of the theories within the PSL ontology, discuss some of the design principles for the ontology, and finish with examples of process specifications that are based on the ontology.

Ontologies to Support Process Integration in Enterprise Engineering

Enterprise design knowledge is currently descriptive, ad hoc, or pre-scientific. One reason for this state of affairs in enterprise design is that existing approaches lack an adequate specification of the terminology of the enterprise models, which leads to inconsistent interpretation and uses of knowledge. We use the formal enterprise models being developed as part of the Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project to provide a precise specification of enterprise structure, and use this structure to characterize process integration within the enterprise. We then use the constraints within the enterprise model to define a special class of enterprises, and discuss the concepts necessary to characterize process integration within this class. The results of this paper arose out of the successful application of these ontologies to the analysis of the IBM Opportunity Management Process in a joint project with IBM Canada.

The Process Interchange Format and Framework

This document provides the specification of the Process Interchange Format (PIF) version 1.2. The goal of this work is to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process descriptions among a wide variety of business process modelling and support systems such as workflow software, flow charting tools, planners, process simulation systems and process repositories. Instead of having to write ad hoc translators for each pair of such systems each system will only need to have a single translator for converting process descriptions in that system into and out of the common PIF format. Then any system will be able to automatically exchange basic process descriptions with any other system. This document describes the PIF-CORE 1.2, i.e. the core set of object types (such as activities, agents and prerequisite relations) that can be used to describe the basic elements of any process. The document also describes a framework for extending the core set of object types to include additional information needed in specific applications. These extended descriptions are exchanged in such a way that the common elements are interpretable by any PIF translator, and the additional elements are interpretable by any translator that knows about the extensions. The PIF format was developed by a working group including representatives from several universities and companies, and has been used for experimental automatic translations among systems developed independently at three of these sites. This document is being distributed in the hopes that other groups will comment upon the interchange format proposed here, and that this format (or future versions of it) may be useful to other groups as well. The PIF Document 1.0 was released in December 1994, and the current document reports the revised PIF that incorporate the feedback received since then.

Manufacturing knowledge sharing in PLM: a progression towards the use of heavy weight ontologies

The drive to maximize the potential benefits of decision support systems continues to increase as industry is continually driven by the competitive needs of operating in dynamic global environments. The more extensive information support tools which are becoming available in the PLM world appear to have great potential but require a substantial overhead in their configuration. However, sharing information and knowledge in cross-disciplinary teams and across system and company boundaries is not straightforward and there is a clear need for more effective frameworks for information and knowledge sharing if new product development processes are to have effective ICT support. This paper presents a view of the current status of manufacturing information sharing using light-weight ontologies and goes on to discuss the potential for heavyweight ontological engineering approaches such as the Process Specification Language (PSL). It explains why such languages are needed and how they provide an important step towards process knowledge sharing. Machining examples are used to illustrate how PSL provides a rigorous basis for process knowledge sharing and subsequently to illustrate the value of linking foundation and domain ontologies to provide a basis for multi-context knowledge sharing.

An organisation ontology for enterprise modelling: preliminary concepts for linking structure and behaviour

The paper presents our preliminary exploration into an organisation ontology for the TOVE enterprise model. The ontology puts forward a number of conceptualizations for modeling organisations: agents, roles, positions, goals, communication, authority, commitment. Its primary focus has been in linking structure and behaviour through the concept of empowerment. Empowerment is the right of an organisation agent to perform status changing actions. This linkage is critical to the unification of enterprise models and their executability.

The Logic of Enterprise Modelling

A number of issues exist concerning the design of Enterprise Models. Reusability is concerned with the large cost of building enterprise-wide data models. Is there such a thing as a generic, reusable enterprise model whose use will significantly reduce the cost of information system building? A second issue is the Consistent Usage of the model: Given the set of possible applications of the model, can the models contents be precisely and rigorously defined so that its use is consistent across the, enterprise? A third issue is model Accessibility . Given the need for people and other agents to access information relevant to their role, can the model be defined so that it supports query processing, both surface and shallow 1 . Lastly, there is the Selection issue: How do I know which is the right Enterprise Model for my application?

CAD/CAPP Integration using Feature Ontology

In a collaborative computer-supported engineering environment, the interoperation of various applications will need a representation that goes beyond the current geometry-based representation, which is inadequate for capturing semantic information. The primary purpose of this study is to discuss a semantically based information exchange protocol that will facilitate seamless interoperability among current and next generation computer-aided design systems (CAD) and between CAD and other systems that use product data. An ontological approach is described to integrating computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided process planning (CAPP). Two commercial software applications are used to demonstrate the approach. This involves the development of a shared ontology and domain specific ontologies in the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) language. Domain specific ontologies — which are feature-based — are developed after a detailed analysis of the CAD and the CAPP software. Mapping between the domain ontologies and the shared ontology is achieved by several mapping rules. The approach is validated by using a variety of parts.