Evaluation of Configuration Knowledge in Industrial Manufacturing

Current industrial information systems maintain and process immense amounts of knowledge to be used for the development, configuration, and production of artifacts. From a logical point of view these elements process knowledge abozt the same concepts albeit existing in different information systems. From a practical point of view, however, the systems are only loosely coupled and only have little linkage. These semantic gaps prevent a seamless analysis and evaluation of the entire knowledge, which in practice, is of significant importance for productional success. In this paper, we propose a general high-level ontology that integrates with the knowledge of the information systems and enables the analysis and evaluation tasks. We describe the basic concepts and properties of industrial knowledge and motivate a number of general evaluation tasks.