Semantic GIOVE-VF: An ontology-based virtual factory tool

This paper presents an ontology-based Virtual Factory tool to support the 3D design of factories. The official ifcOWL is the reference ontology that was adopted to develop the I/O software connector of the tool. The key advantage of the ontology interface is represented by the easy integration with other software tools that can either use the layout generated by GIOVE-VF or provide information about the evolution of the objects that can be visualized in realistic animations.