Ontology for Industrial Engineering: A DOLCE Compliant Approach

Recent academic and industrial initiatives show an increasing interest in the use of foundational ontologies to support the development of domain-specific ontologies. Foundational ontologies guarantee formal and conceptual robustness, and at the same time support the integration of multiple domain-ontologies aligned to the same foundational ontology. This paper reports some ongoing work in this area focusing on the application of the dolce ontology in the manufacturing domain. Taking advantage of the newly formal representation of dolce in OWL and building on previous modeling works, the paper shows how different modeling strategies can be used depending on the engineering requirements at hand, and discusses advantages and disadvantages of these strategies. We exemplify the discussion by means of an industrial case study