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Iof-maint -- Modular maintenance ontology

Melinda Hodkiewicz, Caitlin Woods, Matt Selway, Markus Stumptner

TL;DR

IOF-Maint presents a publicly available modular maintenance ontology aligned with IOF Core, comprising 20 classes and 2 relations and engineered for OWL 2 DL reasoning. It builds on four application ontologies (Maintenance Activity, Maintenance Work Order, Maintenance State, Maintenance Procedure, and FMEA) to extract and harmonize core concepts into a minimal reference ontology that can interoperate with other IOF modules. The work details governance, URIs, and namespace conventions, demonstrates alignment to BFO, and emphasizes reuse within an ecosystem of industry ontologies, with validation via FAIR assessments and future IDO alignment. Practically, IOF-Maint enables efficient semantic representation of maintenance data for data lakes and enterprise knowledge graphs, supporting data quality, interoperability, and advanced reasoning for maintenance decision-making.

Abstract

In this paper we present a publicly-available maintenance ontology (Iof-maint). Iof-maint is a modular ontology aligned with the Industrial Ontology Foundry Core (IOF Core) and contains 20 classes and 2 relations. It provides a set of maintenance-specific terms used in a wide variety of practical data-driven use cases. Iof-maint supports OWL DL reasoning, is documented, and is actively maintained on GitHub. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Iof-maint reference ontology based on the extraction of common concepts identified in a number of application ontologies working with industry maintenance work order, procedure and failure mode data.

Iof-maint -- Modular maintenance ontology

TL;DR

IOF-Maint presents a publicly available modular maintenance ontology aligned with IOF Core, comprising 20 classes and 2 relations and engineered for OWL 2 DL reasoning. It builds on four application ontologies (Maintenance Activity, Maintenance Work Order, Maintenance State, Maintenance Procedure, and FMEA) to extract and harmonize core concepts into a minimal reference ontology that can interoperate with other IOF modules. The work details governance, URIs, and namespace conventions, demonstrates alignment to BFO, and emphasizes reuse within an ecosystem of industry ontologies, with validation via FAIR assessments and future IDO alignment. Practically, IOF-Maint enables efficient semantic representation of maintenance data for data lakes and enterprise knowledge graphs, supporting data quality, interoperability, and advanced reasoning for maintenance decision-making.

Abstract

In this paper we present a publicly-available maintenance ontology (Iof-maint). Iof-maint is a modular ontology aligned with the Industrial Ontology Foundry Core (IOF Core) and contains 20 classes and 2 relations. It provides a set of maintenance-specific terms used in a wide variety of practical data-driven use cases. Iof-maint supports OWL DL reasoning, is documented, and is actively maintained on GitHub. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Iof-maint reference ontology based on the extraction of common concepts identified in a number of application ontologies working with industry maintenance work order, procedure and failure mode data.
Paper Structure (16 sections, 4 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 16 sections, 4 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Background of Maintenance Management
  4. Ontologies for Maintenance
  5. The Industrial Ontologies Foundry
  6. Language, Namespaces, URIs and Class Axiom Expressions
  7. Approach
  8. Maintenance activity and end-of-life events
  9. Digitisation of maintenance procedures
  10. Maintenance state
  11. Failure modes and effects analysis
  12. Maintenance Reference Ontology
  13. Maintenance-relevant Ontology terms
  14. Formal Definitions and Axioms
  15. Discussion
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: The maintenance management process, adapted from Coetzee coetzee2004maintenance and Karray karray2019romain. The shaded boxes show the stages that have modelling features specific to maintenance management e.g.failure event and maintenance work orders, while the unshaded areas identify generic business process steps.
  • Figure 2: IOF Ontologies import structure
  • Figure 3: Evolution of the Industrial Ontology Core ontology
  • Figure 4: The application ontologies developed in the ontology engineering process for iof-maint