Support of Manufacture Enterprises Collaboration Through the Development of a Reference Ontology: A Contribution in Metrological Domain

Abstract

Nowadays, manufacturing environment is populated with computational information files and records with implicit knowledge, which integration has becoming a major problem to seamless computational integration. Moreover, most of these systems are heterogeneous, thus problems of interoperability are frequent and any collaborative environment becomes easily compromised. Ontologies constitute the set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that describes a domain of interest, contributing to harmonize the information flow within computational systems. The distributed and heterogeneous nature of the organizations, in particular networked enterprises, led to the development of different ontologies for the same or overlapping areas, resulting in non-interoperability. This has become the basis for research methodologies to support a reference ontology, contributing to the standardization and development of ontologies within enterprises and virtual network, providing interoperability properties to intelligent systems. This paper exposes how the MENTOR methodology assisted the development and use of a reference ontology in the field of metrology, contributing to manufacturing teams collaboration and systems’ integration. The aim is to maintain the different ontologies of each partner, providing networked enterprises with coherent interaction and unambiguous communication. The case study in the field of metrology demonstrates the proposed methodology benefits introduced at collaborative manufacturing level.