Phd proposal: A Semantic Resolution Framework for Manufacturing Capability Data Integration

Building flexible manufacturing supply chains requires interoperable and accurate manufacturing service capability (MSC) information of all supply chain participants. Today, MSC information, which is typically published either on the supplier’s web site or registered at an e-marketplace portal, has been shown to fall short of the interoperability and accuracy requirements. This issue can be addressed by annotating the MSC information using shared ontologies. However, ontology-based approaches face two main challenges: 1) lack of an effective way to transform a large amount of complex MSC information hidden in the web sites of manufacturers into a representation of shared semantics and 2) difficulties in the adoption of ontology-based approaches by the supply chain managers and users because of their unfamiliar of the syntax and semantics of formal ontology languages such as OWL and RDF and the lack of tools friendly for inexperienced users.

The objective of our research is to address the main challenges of ontology-based approaches by developing an innovative approach that can effectively extract a large volume of manufacturing capability instance data, accurately annotate these instance data with semantics and integrate these data under a formal manufacturing domain ontology. To achieve the objective, a Semantic Resolution Framework is proposed to guides every step of the manufacturing capability data integration process and to resolve semantic heterogeneity with minimal human supervision. The key innovations of this framework includes 1) three assisting systems, including a Triple Store Extractor, a Triple Store to Ontology Mapper and a Ontology-based Extensible Dynamic Form, that can efficiently and effectively perform the automatic processes of extracting, annotating and integrating manufacturing capability data.; 2) a Semantic Resolution Knowledge Base (SR-KB) that incrementally filled with, among other things, rules/patterns learned from errors. This SR-KB together with an Upper Manufacturing Domain Ontology (UMO) provide knowledge for resolving semantic differences in the integration process; 3) an evolution mechanism that enables SR-KB to continuously improve itself and gradually reduce the human involvement by learning from mistakes.

Committee: Yun Peng (chair), Charles Nicholas, Tim Finin, Yaacov Yesha, Boonserm Kulvatunyou (NIST)