A wide range of applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include project management, workflow management, business process reengineering, product realization process modeling, manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, and Computer Aided Software Engineering, each of which is supported by some combination of graphical programming and control languages, Petri nets, PERT charts or other representation methodology. Each of these applications serves a specific audience and need, and focuses on particular aspects of a process. Nevertheless, much could be gained by sharing information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack of any common representation of what is really the common underlying concept of process. The objective of the work described here is an investigation of the feasibility of a unifying specification of process which is applicable to all of the above applications, yet powerful and robust enough to meet each set of requirements. This document represents the results of the first phase of the work – that of researching the process representational requirements for design/manufacturing process life-cycle applications. These requirements are categorized into four categories; core, outer core, extensions, and application, which aided in describing the role of the requirements in the overall challenge of process representation.

The current manufacturing planning software systems (such as computer aided process planning (CAPP) systems) are general and in a closed form, i.e., it is very difficult to modify these systems to respond to a user's dynamically changing needs. These systems are no longer suitable for agile manufacturing. This research work aims at developing an architecture for rapid development of CAPP systems. The architecture supports the construction of CAPP systems from prepackaged, plug-compatible software components. The specifications of the architecture and its building blocks are defined. A prototype system is under development to prove the concept.

Mere sharing of information between engineering design systems and manufacturing systems does not represent an ideal integrated system. While information sharing represents an important aspect of an integrated design and manufacturing environment, an equally critical aspect is the "interaction" capability of the two systems. This interaction could be in the form of feedback and request messages between the design and manufacturing systems. The goal of this study is to investigate the issues involved in the development of a conceptual message model that will facilitate an "upstream" and a "downstream" communication between the design activities and process planning activities. The development of a message model is an attempt to capture the design/process planner dialogue in a computer representable and interpretable form.

In April, 1997, the Process Specification Language (PSL) Project held a Roundtable discussion at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goals of the Roundtable was to assemble key champions and stakeholders of various approaches towards process representation in order to discuss the relative merits to reach consensus on a language architecture and to establish a technical approach for proceeding. It was agreed that the language architecture should be based upon a formal semantic foundation, upon which would be layered a number of syntactic mappings, each with one or more presentations.

In discussions about principal concepts of any process representation, it was agreed that “process” and “participant (resource)” are basic. A number of possible other concepts were suggested, but no consensus was reached. Additionally, five potential uses for the PSL were identified and discussed. They were: 1) provide a description of a process that has already occurred; 2) provide a “recipe” (prescription) describing how a process can occur; 3) provide a semantic model to determine concepts and establish the scope of systems; 4) enable interoperability between manufacturing systems, enterprise systems, and/or AI systems; 5) enable technology transfer between manufacturing and other disciplines.

Finally, three teams were formed to define:

• A set of scenarios to support the identification and definition of semantic concepts and to provide potential uses of the language;

• A semantic description covering a small subset of the core language requirements;

• Three syntactic interpretations of that semantic description, mapping to object-oriented, KIF, and constraint-based presentations. A relational presentation was also deemed important, but no assignment was made. Much of this work must wait until an initial set of semantic concepts is determined.

The goal of the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL) project is to investigate and arrive at a neutral, unifying representation of process information to enable sharing of process data among manufacturing engineering and business applications. This paper focuses on the second phase of the project, the analysis of existing process representations to determine how well existing process representation methodologies support the requirements for specifying processes found in Phase One. This analysis will provide an objective basis from which to develop a comprehensive language and will promote the leveraging of existing work.

A wide range of manufacturing software applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, project management, workflow, business process reengineering, and product realization process modeling. While each of these applications serves a specific audience and need and focuses on particular aspects of a process, much could be gained by sharing process information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack of any common representation of what is really the underlying concept of process. The objective of the work described here is to investigate the feasibility of a unifying specification of process that is applicable to all of the above manufacturing applications, yet powerful and robust enough to meet each set of requirements. The results of the first phase of the work – that of researching the process specification requirements for design/manufacturing process life-cycle applications – are described and analyzed. Alternative views of the process specification requirements provide the ability to better understand them, to ensure their completeness, and to envision the structure and approach of a future, generic process specification language (PSL). Task, resource, product, and time are identified and analyzed as the fundamental aspects of process, offering insights to understanding, analyzing, and improving manufacturing and business processes.

As manufacturing and commerce become ever more global in nature, companies are increasingly dependent upon the efficient and effective exchange of information with their partners, wherever they may be. Leading manufacturers rely upon computers to perform this information exchange, which must therefore be encoded for electronic transmission. Because no single company can dictate that all its partners use the same software, standards for how the information is represented become critical for cost-effective, errorfree transmission of data. This paper discusses some interoperability issues related to current standards, and describes two projects underway at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the areas of interoperability testing, and in self-integration research. We believe that tomorrow’s standards will rely heavily upon the use of formal logic representations, and that these will enable automation of many integration tasks.

As manufacturing and commerce become ever more global, companies are dependent increasingly upon the efficient and effective sharing of information with their partners, wherever they may be. Leading manufacturers perform this sharing with computers, which must therefore have the required software to encode and decode the associated electronic transmissions. Because no single company can dictate that all its partners use the same software, standards for how the information is represented become critical for error-free transmission and translation. The terms interoperability and integration are frequently used to refer to this error-free transmission and translation. This paper summarizes two projects underway at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the areas of interoperability testing and integration automation. These projects lay the foundation for at tomorrow’s standards, which we believe will rely heavily upon the use of formal logic representations, commonly called ontologies.

The growth in the use of the Internet brings with it an increase in the number of interconnections among information systems supporting the manufacturing supply chain as well as other businesses. Each of these interconnections must be carefully prescribed to ensure interoperability. However, the sheer number of interconnections and the resulting complexity threaten to overwhelm the ability of the standards community or industry to provide the necessary specifications—a way out of this impasse must be found. This paper outlines the elements of an approach and the technology to move toward self-integrating systems, wherein the systems negotiate meaningful interfaces as needed in a dynamic environment.

The need for increased precision in information standards coupled with the desire to automate parts of the system integration process has led us to the use of a formal semantic approach to systems integration. This paper provides a brief overview of some of the relevant semantics-based work underway within the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division at NIST.

In this position paper, we briefly describe the perspective of the US National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR, http://ncor.us) on ontology evaluation. NCOR’s inauguration was recently held (October 2005), and at that time goals were identified and committees formed to pursue those goals, including the Ontology Evaluation Committee. This committee is charged with developing a plan for the evaluation of ontologies that is designed to transform ontological engineering into a true scientific and engineering discipline. This paper discusses some issues on ontology evaluation, including the relevant questions to ask, and suggests some approaches.

On March 14-15 in Gaithersburg, MD, at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Upper Ontology Summit (UOS) took place. The Upper Ontology Summit was a convening of custodians of several prominent upper ontologies, key ontology technology participants, and interested other parties, with the purpose of finding a means to relate the different ontologies to each other. The result is reflected in a joint communiqué, directed to the larger ontology community and the general public, and expressing a joint intent to build bridges among the existing upper ontologies in ways designed to increase and rationalize their utilization and to enhance their semantic interoperability. The Upper Ontology Summit was sponsored by NIST, Ontolog, the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), MITRE, and many other organizations. The UOS was organized by a committee consisting of Pat Cassidy, Peter Yim, Steve Ray, Dagobert Soergel, and Leo Obrst.

Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of ontologies as semantic models intended to capture and represent aspects of the real world. There is, however, great variation in the quality of ontologies. If ontologies are to become progressively better in the future, more rigorously developed, and more appropriately compared, then a systematic discipline of ontology evaluation must be created to ensure quality of content and methodology. Systematic methods for ontology evaluation will take into account representation of individual ontologies, performance and accuracy on tasks for which the ontology is designed and used, degree of alignment with other ontologies and their compatibility with automated reasoning. A sound and systematic approach to ontology evaluation is required to transform ontology engineering into a true scientific and engineering discipline. This chapter discusses issues and problems in ontology evaluation, describes some current strategies, and suggests some approaches that might be useful in the future.