An analysis of existing ontological systems for applications in manufacturing and healthcare
Craig I. Schlenoff, Peter O. Denno, Don Libes, Simon Szykman, Robert W. Ivester · 1999
The objective of this work described in this paper is to move closer to the ultimate goal of seamless system integration using the principle behind ontological engineering to unambiguously define domain-specific concepts.A major challenge facing industry today is the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous systems.This challenge is apparent in many sectors, including both healthcare and manufacturing.Current integration efforts are usually based solely on how information is represented (the syntax or terminology) without a description of what the information means (the semantics).With the growing complexity of information and the increasing need to completely and correctly exchange information among different systems, the need for precise and unambiguous capture of the meaning of concepts within a given system is becoming apparent.The approach for this project is to analyze current ontological systems to determine which is most suitable to model the concepts in both the healthcare and manufacturing domains.Examples of ontological systems include the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS 1), CYC 2 ' 3 , and the Ontolingua server.For the manufacturing-related ontologies, the project will move to formally identifying and modeling concepts (and definitions of those concepts) from various manufacturing domains and projects (e.g., process specification, product modeling, resource representations, etc.) in this ontological system.At this point, an analysis can help to identify inconsistencies in the use of terms among various domains as well as help to establish a means to generalize these terms to a level that is common among the domains in question.The output of the work documented in this paper will be a taxonomy of terms and concepts along with formal definitions of exactly what each of those terms/concepts mean and how they interrelate.Although it would be impossible to create a complete taxonomy of every interpretation of every term, a high-level, extensible subset of this taxonomy will be created to serve as a basis for future, domain-specific additions and specializations.This shared understanding of concepts could then be used to integrate applications and systems that function towards a common goal.This paper documents the results of the first phase of this projectthat of analyzing existing ontological systems to determine which is most appropriate for the manufacturing and healthcare domains.In particular, this phase involved the exploration of efforts that are studying both the uses of ontologies in the general sense and those that are using ontologies for domain specific purposes.2.0 Why Ontologies for Manufacturing?This section considers what value the investigated ontologies might provide to the area of information technology within manufacturing.Communication and context are important notions to understanding the role of the investigated ontologies vis a vis other technologies.This and the related concepts of formality, ground, and context availability are discussed.Three areas of potential benefit are then considered: unambiguous communication, standards making/semantic alignment efforts and the future industrial information infrastructure.