Procedural Knowledge Ontology (PKO)

TL;DR

The paper tackles the problem of tacit and fragmented Procedural Knowledge (PK) in industry by introducing PKO, the Procedural Knowledge Ontology, which semantically models procedures, their executions, and related resources. Developed via the Linked Open Terms (LOT) methodology, PKO combines a core module with an industry-specific module and reuses established ontologies such as PROV-O and P-Plan to ensure interoperability and governance across the PK lifecycle. It details requirements collection from three industrial use cases, formalizes the ontology in OWL, and publishes it with documentation, licensing, and maintenance plans, accompanied by evaluation using automatic pitfalls checks and standard ontology criteria. Practical demonstrations include a LOTO safety procedure and a cross-domain recipe, illustrating PKO’s applicability to diverse domains and its potential for PK elicitation through guided tooling and PK exploitation via KG-powered conversational AI, with further opportunities in Digital Twins and cross-industry reuse.

Abstract

Processes, workflows and guidelines are core to ensure the correct functioning of industrial companies: for the successful operations of factory lines, machinery or services, often industry operators rely on their past experience and know-how. The effect is that this Procedural Knowledge (PK) remains tacit and, as such, difficult to exploit efficiently and effectively. This paper presents PKO, the Procedural Knowledge Ontology, which enables the explicit modeling of procedures and their executions, by reusing and extending existing ontologies. PKO is built on requirements collected from three heterogeneous industrial use cases and can be exploited by any AI and data-driven tools that rely on a shared and interoperable representation to support the governance of PK throughout its life cycle. We describe its structure and design methodology, and outline its relevance, quality, and impact by discussing applications leveraging PKO for PK elicitation and exploitation.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Graphical representation of PKO core.
• Figure 2: Usage example of PKO for LOTO procedures.
• Figure 3: Usage example of PKO for recipes.