Industrial Ontologies Foundry

The IOF (The Industrial Ontologies Foundry) is a unit of OAGi (Open Applications Group), a non-profit organization with the mission to reduce the cost of integration by developing interoperable, cross-functional, cross-industry, data-model-driven, and extensible standards to meet the challenge of a rapidly-changing global digital economy.

IOF's mission is to create a suite of ontologies intended to support digital manufacturing by facilitating cross-system data integration within the factory and across an enterprise; in commerce between suppliers, manufacturers, customers, and other trading partners; and throughout the various stages of the product life-cycle. The IOF ontologies consist of a common mid-level ontology, "Core," and several domain specific ontologies.

The IOF Core Ontology resides at the top of this suite from an architectural perspective and contains terms found in several operational areas of manufacturing. Additionally, the architectural approach chosen by the IOF is to base all of its ontologies on a single foundational or top-level ontology–for which the IOF chose the Basic Formal Ontology or BFO. The Core Ontology contains many intermediate-level terms that derive from BFO and from which the IOF ontologies derive domain industry terms. Core intermediate-level terms are often domain independent–meaning one can find them in other industries and fields, such as in the banking, insurance, and healthcare industries, or the sciences, as in the physics, chemistry, and biology domains.