Ontology Engineering for Distributed Collaboration in Manufacturing

The problems of inter-operability are acute for manufacturing applications, as applications using process specifications do not necessarily share syntax and definitions of concepts. The Process Specification Language developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology proposes a formal ontology and translation mechanisms representing manufacturing concepts. When an application becomes ‘PSL compliant,’ its concepts are expressed using PSL, with a direct one-to-one mapping or with a mapping under certain conditions. An example of how to resolve semantic ambiguities is provided for the manufacturing concept ‘resource’. Finally some ideas on how to use PSL for inter-operability in agent-based systems are presented.