Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
A Semantic Resolution Framework for Integrating
Manufacturing Service Capability Data
Yan Kang
10:00am Monday 27 April 2015, ITE 217b
Building flexible manufacturing supply chains requires availability of interoperable and accurate manufacturing service capability (MSC) information of all supply chain participants. Today, MSC information, which is typically published either on the supplier’s web site or registered at an e-marketplace portal, has been shown to fall short of interoperability and accuracy requirements. The issue of interoperability can be addressed by annotating the MSC information using shared ontologies. However, this ontology-based approach faces three main challenges: (1) lack of an effective way to automatically extract a large volume of MSC instance data hidden in the web sites of manufacturers that need to be annotated; (2) difficulties in accurately identifying semantics of these extracted data and resolving semantic heterogeneities among individual sources of these data while integrating them under shared formal ontologies; (3) difficulties in the adoption of ontology-based approaches by the supply chain managers and users because of their unfamiliarity with the syntax and semantics of formal ontology languages such as the web ontology language (OWL).
The objective of our research is to address the main challenges of ontology-based approaches by developing an innovative approach that is able to extract MSC instances from a broad range of manufacturing web sites that may present MSC instances in various ways, accurately annotate MSC instances with formal defined semantics on a large scale, and integrate these annotated MSC instances into formal manufacturing domain ontologies to facilitate the formation of supply chains of manufacturers. To achieve this objective, we propose a semantic resolution framework (SRF) that consists of three main components: a MSC instance extractor, a MSC Instance annotator and a semantic resolution knowledge base. The instance extractor builds a local semantic model that we call instance description model (IDM) for each target manufacturer web site. The innovative aspect of the IDM is that it captures the intended structure of the target web site and associates each extracted MSC instance with a context that describes possible semantics of that instance. The instance annotator starts the semantic resolution by identifying the most appropriate class from a (or a set of) manufacturing domain ontology (or ontologies) (MDO) to annotate each instance based on the mappings established between the context of that instance and the vocabularies (i.e., classes and properties) defined in the MDO. The primary goal of the semantic resolution knowledge base (SR-KB) is to resolve semantic heterogeneity that may occur in the instance annotation process and thus improve the accuracy of the annotated MSC instances. The experimental results demonstrate that the instance extractor and the instance annotator can effectively discover and annotate MSC instances while the SR-KB is able to improve both precision and recall of annotated instances and reducing human involvement along with the evolution of the knowledge base.
Committee: Drs. Yun Peng (Chair), Tim Finin, Yaacov Yesha, Matthew Schmill and Boonserm Kulvatunyou