Semantic Web for manufacturing, trends and open issues: Toward a state of the art

• Current manufacturing approaches related with knowledge representation and reuse are listed and described.
• Ontology and the Semantic Web, aspects related with formalization and its shortcoming are introduced and discussed.
• A categorization of contributions related with Semantic Manufacturing is proposed.

Achieving success in modern industry requires the orchestration of the stakeholders of the manufacturing process as well as accessing information distributed along the manufacturing network involved; this latter is a key factor. Many manufacturing approaches have appeared with the aim of speeding up the manufacturing process by means of accessing certain knowledge encoded in a way that makes it reusable. Ontologies and the Semantic Web are emerging technologies proposed for knowledge representation and reasoning, which tend to be adopted in the manufacturing domain in order to deal and to facilitate such tasks. However, we have identified that many of the shortcomings of the proposed technologies have been neglected by some authors, compromising the feasibility of including them into any proposed approach. In this study we aim at describing the most prominent approaches which relate manufacturing with knowledge representation. Furthermore some formal aspects of Ontology and Semantic Web technologies will be introduced, with the intention of present a general view that integrates research contributions which combine both approaches in an emerging approach called Semantic Manufacturing.