A literature review of sensor ontologies for manufacturing applications

The purpose of this paper is to review existing sensor and sensor network ontologies to understand whether they can be reused as a basis for a manufacturing perception sensor ontology, or if the existing ontologies hold lessons for the development of a new ontology. We develop an initial set of requirements that should apply to a manufacturing perception sensor ontology. These initial requirements are used in reviewing selected existing sensor ontologies. Additionally, we present our developed sensor ontology thus far that incorporates a refined list of requirements. This paper describes 1) extending and refining the requirements; 2) proposing hierarchical structures for verifying the purposes of the ontology; 3) choosing appropriate tools and languages (e.g., OWL (Web Ontology Language) [1] and SensorML (Sensor Markup Language) [2]) to support such an ontology; and 4) extending the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology with a set of refined requirements (i.e., our developed ontology). This work will be proposed as a standard within the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Ontologies for Robotics Automation (ORA) Working Group [3].