Ontology-based solutions for interoperability among product lifecycle management systems: A systematic literature review

During recent years, globalization has had an impact on the competitive capacity of industries, forcing them to integrate their productive processes with other, geographically distributed, facilities. This requires the information systems that support such processes to interoperate. Significant attention has been paid to the development of ontology-based solutions, which are meant to tackle issues from inconsistency to semantic interoperability and knowledge reusability. This paper looks into how the available technology, models and ontology-based solutions might interact within the manufacturing industry environment to achieve semantic interoperability among industrial information systems. Through a systematic literature review, this paper has aimed to identify the most relevant elements to consider in the development of an ontology-based solution and how these solutions are being deployed in industry. The research analyzed 54 studies in alignment with the specific requirements of our research questions. The most relevant results show that ontology-based solutions can be set up using OWL as the ontology language, Protege as the ontology modeling tool, Jena as the application programming interface to interact with the built ontology, and different standards from the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 184, Subcommittee 4 or 5, to get the foundational concepts, axioms, and relationships to develop the knowledge base. We believe that the findings of this study make an important contribution to practitioners and researchers as they provide useful information about different projects and choices involved in undertaking projects in the field of industrial ontology application.