Marketing

Reuse

World Wide Web

Engineering

Philosophy

IDEF5

Semantic interoperability

Agile software development

Systems engineering

Interoperability

Computer science

New product development

Manufacturing engineering

Business

Waste management

Product lifecycle

Process management

Epistemology

Agile manufacturing

Ontology

Software engineering

Domain knowledge

Knowledge management

Process ontology

International Journal of Production Research

Ontologies provide an opportunity to tackle the interoperability challenge in digital manufacturing. Although ontologies have been used in numerous industrial projects, the problem of semantic interoperability in the industry is still unresolved. One reason for the lack of success of ontologies in the industry is that most industrial ontologies have been developed based on local needs without taking wider applications into account or attempting to learn from earlier ontology initiatives or reuse the existing ontologies. In this position paper, we argue that for widespread adoption and implementation of ontologies, more systematic and coordinated efforts are needed with the participation of industry, academia, and government at an international level. We also hypothesise that a coordinated and systematic ontology development effort will incrementally lead to the creation of an ecosystem of interoperable software applications that support consistent data access and reasoning across the product life cycle. We discuss why efforts such as Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF) can promote a methodological ontology development process by introducing modular, and reusable ontologies. We draw examples from two domain areas, namely supply chain management and production planning and scheduling, to demonstrate how industrial notions can be analysed ontologically according to IOF procedures and methods.

Industrial ontologies for interoperability in agile and resilient manufacturing