Annotated domain ontologies for the visualization of heterogeneous manufacturing data

Abstract

Manufacturing processes such as monitoring and controlling typically confront the user with a variety of heterogeneous data sources and systems. The cognitive efforts to summarize and combine the data from these different sources affect the user’s efficiency. Our goal is to support the user in his work task by integrating the data and presenting them in a more perceivable way. Hence, we introduce an approach in which different data sources are integrated in an annotated semantic knowledge base: our domain ontology. Based on this ontology, contextually relevant data for a specific work task is selected and embedded into a meta-visualization providing an overview of the data based on the user’s mental model. Two systems finally exemplify the usage of our approach.