ontology

Due to increasingly specialised, diverse and also new competencies and competency profiles it becomes progressively more difficult to interpret educational achievements and to match requirement profiles with the competencies of individual persons or groups. The computational support with regards to keeping the information up to date, communication, search and analysis is limited if the competencies are described in natural language only. Thus, it seems advantageous to model competencies in a formal and machine-readable specification language. The following article suggests the notion of a generic formal syntax for learning outcomes. We outline how this would allow expressing intricate learning outcomes in a machine-readable ontology and their further processing with the Linked Data- and Semantic Web-approaches.

In order to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in the field of large-scale plant construction, the requirements relevant for construction site logistics planning as well as the planning and controlling of logistics processes in large-scale plant construction using digital models are being investigated within the framework of the research project BIMLog. In this paper, the planning-relevant requirements and their description are presented in an ontology as the basis of a digital planning.

The rise of the complexity of products and the product development process in addition to shorter development cycles and the customers’ high demands on quality, increase the pressure on producing as accurately and economically as possible. Hence, it is necessary to avoid errors in the early phases of development instead of fixing them at a later stage, which can be costly. This article uses the product configuration of milling robot units to show an innovative solution for the early development phase. This approach uses established technologies from the area of semantic technologies and problem solving methods. It also shows how to improve the reliability of product configuration by making use of the expertise from later phases in the development.

Nanotechnology offers great potentials for improved product properties and innovative functionalities which have to be considered in the product development in an early stage and compared with product requirements. In practice, a gap is to be recognised between nanotechnology and product development. An approach to close the gap and to improve the interoperability is to define a common language based on a functional-based view. The formalisation and mapping of the functions uses semantic nets and ontologies in order to allow a dynamic expanding and machine readability. Thus, applications and nanotechnology will be linked with the objective of generation new product ideas by nanotechnology.

The development of new complex products is increasingly conducted cooperatively in distributed, heterogeneous organisations in a dynamic environment. To successfully accomplish a project, the coordination of project controlling is of vital importance. Each participant of the development network has individual controlling systems, which cover his information and management needs. For cross-project controlling however, the creation of interoperability between distributed systems is a precondition for the coordination of processes. The article describes a cross-project controlling approach, which fosters integration by semantic modelling.

Turbulent business environments force enterprises to ever faster answers and adaptions in order to secure their competitive ability. Mutability and responseability as crucial success factors are based finally on knowledge, which must be continuously improved and renewed. The article shows starting points and how ontology based knowledge management can be used purposefully for the increase of the mutability in and by enterprises and in particular in the assembly.

Shorter times to market determine the competitiveness of companies in all industries. The necessary approaches to improvement of industrial processes have to focus on the optimisation of the entire product lifecycle. The resulting management and organisational approach is called PLM. The preliminary integration of all data along the lifecycle can only be handled by semantic technologies. In addition, the introduced approach brings sufficient intelligence to capture enterprise knowledge and effective task support for employees.

Speed and cost reduction are plainly the factors of success in global competition. But more and more, the increasing amount of information aggravates the efficient access and finding of information from different systems. Semantic technologies provide convincing solutions by integration of process related knowledge models. Field-tested applications from areas like information retrieval, product development and online consulting illustrate further areas of application.