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RESEARCH PRODUCT

An Ontology Architecture for Standards Integration and Conformance in Manufacturing

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Standards reflect consensus on the semantics of terms. When used to communicate, whether between people or software systems, standards ensure the communication is correct. Different standards have different semantics for the same terms and express common concepts using different terms and in different ways. Communication between software systems based on different standards is sometimes difficult to achieve. Standards integration concerns the explicit representation of the overlapping sets of concepts in standards and the differences in their semantics to ensure that these standards are used consistently together. This in turn enables software that is based on integrated standards to interoperate, reducing the cost of software integration. Standards conformance determines whether the interpretation of the standardized terms used by software applications is consistent with semantics given by the standards. This paper proposes a general architecture to design ontologies for standards integration and conformance in manufacturing engineering. The ontology architecture is divided into four levels: vendor, standards, domain, and core. Manufacturing turning tools are used as a case study to illustrate the approach. Finally this paper offers some short examples of first order logic propositions.