Seamless information integration in network enterprises using MENTOR: Development of a reference ontology in metrological domain

Abstract

Manufacturing teams face the challenge of integration and reuse of computational information systems and knowledge. Ontologies constitute a set of concepts, axioms and relationships describing a domain of interest. The distributed and heterogeneous nature of the organizations, in particular networked enterprises, led to the development of different ontologies for the same or overlapping areas, resulting in non-interoperability. This has become the basis for research methodologies to support a reference ontology, contributing to the standardization and development of ontologies within enterprises and virtual network, providing interoperability properties to intelligent systems. This paper extends the MENTOR methodology to support the development of reference ontology in the field of metrology. The aim is to maintain the different ontologies of each partner, providing networked enterprises with coherent interaction and unambiguous communication. A case study in the field of metrology is presented and the proposed methodology is demonstrated. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.