The Ontological Stance for a Manufacturing Scenario

The semantic integration of software systems can be supported through a shared understanding of the terminology in their respective ontologies. In practice, however, the author is faced with the additional challenge that few applications have an explicitly axiomatized ontology. To address this challenge, we adopt the Ontological Stance, in which we can model a software application as if it were an inference system with an axiomatized ontology, and use this ontology to predict the set of sentences that the inference system determines to be entailed or satisfiable. This chapter gives an overview of a deployment of the Process Specification Language (PSL) Ontology as the interchange ontology for the semantic integration of three manufacturing software applications currently being used in industry -- a process modeller, a process planner, and a scheduler.