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Session Interoperability
Duration 1 hour
Date/Time 29 Apr 2026 16:00 GMT
9:00am PDT/12:00pm EDT
5:00pm BST/6:00pm CST
Convener Todd Schneider

Ontology Summit 2026 Interoperability

  • Todd Schneider Introduction to the Interoperability Track
  • Will Sobel The Evolution of an Industrial Standard: From Paper to Ontology
    • The MTConnect Standard has progressed from an XML- and PDF-based normative to a SysML model, and now to an ontology layer on top of the information model. The transition from paper to a model-based approach has yielded significant advantages, but it has not resolved critical concerns regarding validation, trustworthiness, and usability. As the standard has matured, additional challenges have arisen that modeling languages such as SysML cannot address. With the increasing need for cross-domain information sharing and supplier agility, existing standards impede interoperability due to insufficient semantic representation and siloed viewpoints. These issues have become very apparent as we explore certain domains, such as capabilities, that cannot be addressed without an ontological approach.
    • William Sobel has been architecting complex systems across various industries for over 35 years. For the last 19 years, Mr. Sobel has served as the Chief Architect and chair of the Executive Committee of the MTConnect Standard, an international model-based standard for manufacturing equipment and the IIoT. Additionally, he leads the Industrial Ontologies Foundry Architecture Working Group, which advances support for cross-domain industrial knowledge and explainable AI. While leading the architecture of the MTConnect standard, Mr. Sobel was the CEO of VIMANA, a leading industrial analytics platform. Before VIMANA, he worked as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching agile web development and data center optimization using machine learning at RadLAB. Before UC Berkeley, Mr. Sobel worked in the financial industry for 17 years. He served as VP and Chief Architect at MSCI-Barra, leading a team that was architecting the industry's first and leading SaaS financial risk management software.
    • Slides
    • Video Recording
    • YouTube Video

Conference Call Information

Discussion

12:33:55 TS : If inconsistencies are found, how will the (text) standard be modified?

12:35:44 John Sowa : OWL is a rinky dink disaster/

  • TS : John, yes. OWL is not ideal, but it’s ‘accepted’ and there is a lot of support for it.
  • John Sowa : Full first-order logic is the barest minimum for expressivity of any reasonable system.
  • John Sowa : And FOL has a very clean and simple mapping to and from English or any other natural language..
  • John Sowa : And FOL has an extremely large and powerful supply of powerful tools for EVERYTHING imaginable.
  • John Sowa : Tim Berners Lee in 2000 stated FOL as the barest minimum for representing the Semantic Web.
  • Ram D Sriram : I agree with John on FOL, but Todd's question of what to do with current OWL implementations needs to be addressed.

12:35:56 Ram D Sriram : A related work from NIST can be found at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001044851200022X

12:42:33 Ram D Sriram : Another paper of interest is: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1458714

12:48:52 Ram D Sriram : This paper describes how OntoSTEP was used in the FRENCH ANGEL project: Danjou, C., Le Duigou, J., & Eynard, B. (2016). Closed-loop manufacturing, a STEP-NC process for data feedback: A case study. Procedia CIRP, 41, 852–857. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2015.12.128 Cited by: 7

  • This paper was presented at the 48th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems (Helena et al., 2022). It is a critical reference for the ANGEL project because it demonstrates how the STEP-NC (ISO 14649) standard can be used as a bidirectional data model to bridge the gap between CAM systems and CNC machines (Helena et al., 2022).
  • By utilizing OntoSTEP-NC, the researchers established a "data feedback" loop that allows manufacturing knowledge and real-world machine performance to be sent back to the design and programming stages, enabling more intelligent and automated process planning (Helena et al., 2022; Thomas et al., 2021).
  • Will Sobel : OntoSTEP was a translation from EXPRESS to OWL and didn’t fix any of the issues in the EXPRESS model. They also didn’t adhere to any higher level theory. STEP AP-242 has multiple identity and unity issues. This is why ED 5 had to move to a new UUID scheme when trying to have design to inspection connectivity.

12:51:48 Jackie Csonka-Peeren : Let us not get caught by our own "ambiguity aversion"

  • TS : Please explain

12:53:22 Yves KERARON (ISADEUS) : And keep the liberty of interpretation to the receiver.

  • Jim Logan ⎱Ontogenesis⎰ : Some would like to reduce the possible interpretations of representations in a model as things in the world.
  • Jackie Csonka-Peeren : 👍
  • Jackie Csonka-Peeren : yes, this makes sense at the 'local' level. Ambiguity in standards promotes wide adoption, which is considered beneficial

12:53:48 Yves KERARON (ISADEUS) : in his concrete context FOL is the barest minimum ; what would be the maximum? Or the reasonable ?

  • Yes we will need extensions to FOL logic (Linear logic, …) and not a limited logic as OWL

13:07:31 Yves KERARON (ISADEUS) : Thank you for the discussion

Resources

Previous Meetings

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ConferenceCall 2026 04 22Synthesis
ConferenceCall 2026 04 15Foundations and Tools
ConferenceCall 2026 04 08Foundations and Tools
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Next Meetings

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ConferenceCall 2026 05 06Interoperability
ConferenceCall 2026 05 13Interoperability
ConferenceCall 2026 05 20Education
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