The IOF Core Ontology
Version 1, January 2023 Release
Introduction
Core is a “mid-level” ontology that resides at the top of the suite of ontologies the IOF seeks to introduce to fulfill its mission of supporting digital manufacturing by standardizing industrial terminology and improving consistency and interoperability across many operational areas of manufacturing and the product life cycle. As a mid-level ontology, Core contains terms used by, or anticipated to be used by, a plurality of ontologies in the suite. Additionally, as the IOF bases all of its ontologies on a single foundational or top-level ontology – for which the IOF has chosen the Basic Formal Ontology or BFO – the Core ontology contains generic terms that build upon BFO and provide a consistent foundation for introducing industrial domain-specific terminologies.
The IOF Core Ontology is developed and formalized as an ontology using both first-order logic and version 2 of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The use of logic ensures that each term is defined in a way that is unambiguous to humans and can be processed by computers. The vocabulary in Core is curated by the Core Working Group and an attempt is made to validate and ground terms utilizing use cases from industry.
The IOF Core Ontology is developed and formalized as an ontology using both first-order logic (FOL) and version 2 of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The use of logic ensures that each term is defined in a way that is least ambiguous to humans, remains applicable across industrial domain uses, and can be processed by computers. The Core Ontology is curated by the Core Working Group and attempts were made to validate and ground terms utilizing use cases from industry. It should be noted however that while the ultimate purpose of including FOL is to provide a more precise formal semantic definition than can be expressed in version 2 of OWL, the FOL annotations provided in the current release merely parallel those of the OWL expressions. The IOF intends to enrich the FOL formalizations in future releases to align more closely with their natural language definitions.
Contents
- Core.rdf – an OWL implementation of the IOF Core Ontology, inclusive of natural language definitions, formalizations in first-order logic, examples, and comments, serialized in rdf/xml.
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meta – folder containing IOF-specific annotation properties used to define and formalize ontology terms, also serialized in rdf/xml, and imported by the core ontology.
- AnnotationVocabulary.rdf – this is the released version of the IOF Annotation Vocabulary, dated 2022-09-29
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commons-to-core-mapping – folder containing selected mid-level ontologies from the OMG Commons Library of Ontologies, providing an option to the IOF and OMG users with an interoperable way to use terms in the topic area of identifiers and designators from both IOF and OMG.
- Commons Folder – The various OMG Commons Ontology files that are interoperable with IOF Core in this release, including Collections.rdf, Designators.rdf, TextDatatype.rdf and Identifiers.rdf
- MappingAnnotationVocabularyToCommons.rdf – Maps the somewhat different OMG annotation vocabulary to the IOF annotation vocabulary
- MappingCommonsToIOF.rdf – maps terms from the OMG Commons ontologies to BFO and/or to IOF
- Commons Folder – The various OMG Commons Ontology files that are interoperable with IOF Core in this release, including Collections.rdf, Designators.rdf, TextDatatype.rdf and Identifiers.rdf
- Catalog-v001.xml – a tooling file for rapid loading of the ontology’s files in the Protégé ontology development tool.
Installing / Getting started
The minimal setup you need short of reading raw XML is a suitable ontology viewer or editing tool, installed on your client machine. IOF recommends a desktop version of the open-source tool Protégé, but other open source and commercial tools are known to work as well. The repository for this ontology includes the necessary files for opening the ontology in Protégé without warnings and errors. The same is not guaranteed for other tools.
To use IOF Core without the need to interoperate with the OMG Commons Ontologies mentioned earlier, simply import Core.rdf into your ontology. To use both IOF Core and the OMG Commons Ontologies mentioned, only import MappingCommonsToIOF.rdf into your ontology. Doing so indirectly imports IOF Core and the applicable OMG Common Ontologies.
Reporting Issues for the Core Ontology and Joining the Discussions
The source for Core and its evolution is managed on GitHub. Please log change requests and bugs for the ontology using the “issues tab” of the GitHub repository for this project. However, if you are a member person or organization of the IOF, we ask that you follow the normal process for reporting change requests and issues via the IOF member portal for the Core Working Group.
Requests and reported bugs are monitored at least bi-weekly during which time you can expect to see a response as to next steps.
External Links
- IOF Web Site for the General Public
- IOF Member Portal
- IOF Mission, History and Charter
- IOF Technical Principles
- IOF Annotation Properties Version 2
- Basic Formal Ontology
Ontology Files (4 files, 83 classes, 97 properties)
| Ontology | Maturity | Classes | Properties | IRI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🟢 Mapping Commons to IOF Core Ontology | 🟢 Released | 0 | 0 | https://spec.industrialontologies.org/ontology/core/commonstocoremapping/MappingCommonsToIOF/ |
| 🟢 Mapping Annotation Vocabulary (AV) to Commons | 🟢 Released | 0 | 0 | https://spec.industrialontologies.org/ontology/core/commonstocoremapping/meta/MappingAnnotationVocabularyToCommons/ |
| 🟢 Core Ontology | 🟢 Released | 82 | 69 | https://spec.industrialontologies.org/ontology/core/Core/ |
| 🟢 Annotation Vocabulary (AV) | 🟢 Released | 1 | 28 | https://spec.industrialontologies.org/ontology/core/meta/AnnotationVocabulary/ |