Enabling technology

Ontologies and Semantic Web Technology

Requirements and asset models are complex in nature. To handle complexity, ontologies and semantic web technology fits very well. These are therefor considered to be key enablers for the READI methodology and the READI tool suite.

The READI participant Aibel – a leading service company within the oil, gas and offshore wind industries – has created three nice videos which are published on Vimeo. Links to the videos are found below. We recommend starting with video 1:

  1. Information and the Semantic Web’: Provides an industry perspective of the semantic web and explains how the semantic web technology represents information at a lower level than documents, links facts and makes it easier for us to search for information and standardize the way we work.
  2. MMD’: In this video Aibel talks about and explains their industrial system using semantic web technology, Aibel’s MMD – Material Master Data.
  3. Semantics and Business Value’: In this video Aibel talks about business value, how application of semantic web techniques, as explained and demonstrated in the previous videos, can improve safety and quality, while at the same time saving money and time. Several use cases are proposed.

Some key aspects might need more explanation:

Ontology:

An ontology is a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain showing the terms’ properties and the relations between them. In information science, an ontology consists of a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data and entities of the domains. The creation of ontologies allows artificial intelligence (AI) systems to “understand” and evaluate texts (i.e., requirements, regulations) in various written forms as well as more structured information from databases. ((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)).

Semantic Web:

“Provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries”. The Semantic Web is therefore regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems. » (https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/).

The architecture of the semantic web is illustrated by the Semantic Web Stack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Stack)