Ontology-based solutions for interoperability among product lifecycle management systems : a systematic literature review

Abstract

In the last years, globalization impacts on the competitive capacity of industries forcing them to integrate their productive processes with other facilities geographically distributed. Hence, information systems supporting such processes should interoperate. Attention has been devoted to the development of ontology-based solutions, which are meant to tackle issues from inconsistency to semantic interoperability and knowledge reusability. Therefore, this paper looked up towards the available technology, models and how ontology-based solutions could interact with manufacture industry environment to achieve the semantic interoperability among industrial information systems. Through a systematic literature review, this paper envisions to identify what are the most relevant elements to be considered in the development of an ontology-based solution and how these solutions were deployed in the industry. This research was concerned about 54 studies analyzed in the process aligned with the specific requirements of the research questions that we have stated in this paper. The most relevant results to highlight show that ontology-based solutions can be undertaken to employ OWL as ontology language, Protégé as the ontology modelling tool, Jena as application programming interface to interact with the built ontology, and different standards from the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 184 Subcommittee 4 or 5 to get the foundational concepts, axioms, and relationships to develop the knowledge base. We believe the findings of this study can supply an important contribution to the practitioners and researchers as it provides them with useful information about the different projects and choices to undertake projects in the industrial ontology application domain.