The Industrial Ontologies Foundry was born on Dec 7, 2016, when the first workshop was held by the Systems Integration Division at the National Institute Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, USA. The idea was initially conceived by Hedi Karray and Barry Smith in Buffalo in the summer of 2016.  It was spearheaded by Dmitris Kiritsis, Serm Kulvatunyou, Barry Smith, KC Morris, Paul Witherell, Nenad Ivezic, and Evan Wallace. It was motivated by the growing number of ontology research projects in the engineering domains being developed without coordination or collaboration. The risk the IOF is trying to mitigate is that the ontologies resulting from these efforts will not be interoperable or scalable.

The first workshop was held in December 2016 and bought together a number of researchers and industry practitioners such as Dassault Systemes and Airbus. This workshop resulted in the creation of two IOF working groups- Governance and Case Studies, and the development of the IOF Charter and Mission.

The second workshop ‘Connecting the dots in Smart Manufacturing’ was held in April 2017. 

The third workshop ‘Creating semantic content for industry’ was held at NIST in the US in April 2018. Following this the IOF set up a number of committees. A Top-down group, a Bottom-up group and three domain working groups on Process Planning, Production Service Systems and Maintenance. Work also started on a Technical Principles document.

The 4th workshop was hosted by the Centre for Ontological Research in Buffalo, NY in September 2018.

The 5th workshop was held in Oslo, Norway 4-7th February 2019. Details are on the Events page on this web site. 

A number of weekly and bi-weekly conference calls are held to enable collaboration and progress IOF projects.