Abstract:
To enable meaningful and consistent communication between different software systems in a particular domain (such as manufacturing, law or medicine), a standardised vocabulary and communication language is required by all the systems involved. Concepts in the domain about which the systems want to communicate are formalized in an ontology by establishing the meaning of concepts and creating relationships between them. The inputs to this process in found by analysing the physical domain and its processes. The resulting ontology structure is a computer useable representation of the physical domain about which the systems want to communicate. To enable the long term persistence of the actual data contained in these concepts and the enforcement of various business rules, a sufficiently powerful database system is required. This paper presents the design of a manufacturing ontology and its accompanying relational database schema that will be used in a manufacturing test domain.
