An Ontology of Industrial Work Varieties

Abstract

Industry 4.0 requires an increased digitalization and automation of industrial processes. Achieving a better understanding of them is a precondition still hindered by several factors. Workers hiding their individual know-how gained in the company to avoid losing power because they hold unique knowledge, and lack of agreement among different workers on how work practices are actually performed, are just two frequent examples of such obstacles. To support process comprehension, we present an upper ontology for modeling industrial work varieties, named Work-As-x (WAx) ontology. The aim is to shed light on the different varieties of work knowledge and on how these are converted between agents within a cyber-socio-technical system, such as an industry. The WAx ontology has been conceived to consider and better manage the different perspectives on the actual industrial processes, such as the Work-As-Imagined held by blunt-end operators and the Work-As-Done by sharp-end operators. The ontology extends the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) to guarantee a rigorous semantic basis. Finally, we discuss how the WAx ontology can be used to semantically annotate different repositories of industrial process representations to the purpose of their analysis.