Released Ontologies

The IOF releases its ontologies as an ontological suite which is versioned as YYYYXX. YYYY represents the year of the release while the XX represents the release number for that year.

Within The IOF ontological suite two types of ontologies exist:

Released – Indicates an ontology that is considered to be stable and mature from a development perspective. Release notes will be provided for any changes concerning released content, and any revisions will be backward compatible with the prior version to the degree possible.

Provisional – Indicates an ontology that is considered to be under development. Provisional content is subject to change and may change substantially before release. IOF users should be aware that it is not dependable but could be used for reference and as the basis for further work.

IOF Ontologies 202301 Release

The IOF Ontologies 202301 has been released in early February 2023. The content of the entire ontological suite can be found here.

Released Ontologies:

IOF Core – Core is a “mid-level” ontology that resides at the top of the suite of ontologies the IOF seeks to introduce to fulfill its mission of supporting digital manufacturing by standardizing industrial terminology and improving consistency and interoperability across many operational areas of manufacturing and the product life cycle. As a mid-level ontology, Core contains terms used by, or anticipated to be used by, a plurality of ontologies in the suite.

Provisional Ontologies:

Maintenance Ontology – The Maintenance Reference Ontology supports modelling of concepts associated with asset reliability and maintenance management. It is relevant for data captured at the design stage of the asset life cycle (e.g. in failure modes and effects analysis) and in the operations and maintenance phase of the life cycle (e.g. asset reliability and the maintenance activities associated with delivering value from use of the assets).

Supply Chain Reference Ontology – Supply Chain Reference Ontology (SCRO) aims to represent the generic constructs (including classes and properties) related to the domain of supply chain and logistics. The purpose of the ontology is to serve as a foundation for ensuring consistency and interoperability across various supply chain and logistics ontologies that use IOF reference ontolgies. The Supply Chain Reference Ontology can be extended to create application ontologies addressing the needs of specific use cases.The developmen of SCRO was initially motivated by use cases related to supplier discovery (i.e., supplier capability matching with manufacturing requirements), logistics, and supply chain traceability. The definitions of the domain terms are extracted from widely acceoted industry standards such as GS! and APICS.