Towards expressive ontology-based approaches to manufacturing knowledge representation and sharing

The present capability that ontological approaches offer to formally represent and share manufacturing knowledge is dependent on the choice of ontological formalism. Currently, there exists a spectrum of these formalisms, which is being subjectively exploited across multiple domains in design and manufacture. Hence, there is an important prerequisite to achieve an understanding of which family of formalism strictly enables the expressive capture of semantics to progress towards meaningful information and viable knowledge sharing. This article analyses the relative strengths and weaknesses in employing a 'lightweight' ontology versus a 'heavyweight' version of the ontology to represent and share knowledge between multiple domains in injection moulding design and manufacture. A pertinent direction, from an ontology perspective, is then exposed as a prescription for the improved capture and dissemination of formal semantics, to support multi-domain knowledge sharing.