Improving the interoperability of industrial information systems with description logic-based models—The state of the art

Semantic technologies that have arisen with web development have brought out new tools, concepts, and methodologies which are increasingly employed in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications. This paper proposes a literature review of papers related to ontologies in the area of product lifecycle management. However, it only focuses on inference ontologies, i.e. ontologies that enable reasoning, for instance, models expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The goals of this paper are to explore the field of such applications, to figure out the advantages of inference ontologies in a PLM context and to synthesize major existing inference models in terms of methodology and structuration. Finally, this paper proposes several research perspectives.

► We propose a state-of-the-art analysis of ontology use in PLM applications.
► We examine ontology expressivity and reasoning capabilities, thus using an exhaustive example.
► We highlight limits of ontology-based languages to model PLM requirements.
► We propose research prospects involving reasoning, IS architecture and methodology.