Formal ontologies in manufacturing

Since the early days of ontology engineering, manufacturing is one of the main areas where ontologies have traditionally been applied (Guarino et al., 1997; Uschold and Grüninger, 1996). The interest in ontologies has been motivated, first, by the massive exploitation of computer-based technologies in manufacturing organizations, which need to manage and share data in a robust way, and second, by the need to harmonize different terminologies to facilitate communication. The two motivations are strictly related, since shared terminologies and models are needed to enable computer systems to interact effectively. In addition, in the new landscape of Industry 4.0 (Lu, 2017), guided and informed by big data and machine learning, ontologies find their place to organize the data upon which learning algorithms run.