Digitalizing Knowledge for Industry 5.0: The Role of Ontologies in DOME 4.0
Addressing human beings needs is the motivation behind every industrial effort. Understanding these needs and providing means to fulfil them is the key to every successful industrial enterprise.
That's what we want to do in DOME 4.0: facilitate the understanding between human beings by using a language that helps them to express clearly what they mean, and hence to easily find what they want.
Ontologists are the people that are pursuing this objective by formalizing knowledge by means of a language that can capture the relations between entities and place them within a logical framework able to support inferences from statements and to host the documentation needed to make users to understand the concepts used to classify the entities. The knowledge formalised in such manner is what we call an ontology, and the language the we are using is called OWL 2 DL that has been defined in the Semantic Web initiative.
One important advantage of such approach is that we introduce the possibility for machines to store, navigate and compute (in the more general sense) such knowledge. In other words, an ontology is a way to digitalize knowledge, in a way that can be understood and interpreted by both humans and machines, which is the core of the Industry 5.0 revolution.
The aim is to provide an ontology framework that can be used by DOME 4.0 to semantically enhance the data hosted by the marketplace, connecting them to a larger knowledge framework, and climbing the data hierarchy up to the top. Data within DOME 4.0 marketplace can progressively increase their value when they are documented up to the level in which they can be easily found and rapidly connected to the users expressing their need. Data become information when it is clear what they are about (e.g., “who”,“what”, “when”,”where”). Become knowledge when they are put in context with other data expressing a state of things. Insight is reached when cause and effects can be inferred from the formalized knowledge, and wisdom when decision making is enabled not only from to the content of the data but also from their connections.
The University of Bologna (UNIBO) is at the forefront of development of ontologies in the field of materials, leading the development of the European Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO), under the governance of the European Materials Modelling Council (EMMC).