Ontology-based knowledge representation for additive manufacturing

The flourishing development of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies calls for robust IT methodologies and solutions to manage the plethora of data that is generated in the AM value chain. The purpose of this paper is to propose a principled knowledge-based model for AM in the form of a computational ontology. As corpus of formally represented knowledge, the ontology constitutes the backbone structure to organize AM data and automatically reason over experts' knowledge for data validation, ultimately supporting the development of algorithms and applications for decision making. By the end of the paper we show some modeling and reasoning examples based on the use of the proposed ontology in a prototype Web application.