The SC4EU Ontology Curation Portal
17. Januar 2025
The semiconductor production industry is a highly intricate field. It involves complex supply chains characterized by short product cycles, strong interdependencies with other industries, and numerous partners. Clear communication plays a crucial role in achieving success within this environment.
Similar to other domains, the semiconductor industry possesses its own body of knowledge, encompassing specialized concepts and their relationships, along with the necessary vocabulary for effective communication. Hence, having a well-defined terminology is paramount for collaboration among experts, enabling them to articulate requirements, technical or non-technical specifications, and reports, among other things. To fulfill this requirement, a common language is essential, encompassing precise definitions of terms and resolving synonyms by establishing their interdependencies.
In addition, communication in the semiconductor industry often takes place between the machines themselves. For example, machines can automatically check production processes or ensure the consistency of delivery agreements. This leads to additional complexity that requires the use of machine-readable and interpretable terminologies, known as ontologies. The Digital Reference (DR) Ontology serves as an ontology for describing and understanding the semiconductor industry.
The Ontology Curation Portal (OCP) is a specialised tool to support collaborative work on ontologies. The OCP was designed for both beginners and experts in the field of ontology development and is intended in particular to support the joint work and management of the DR Ontology and others (such as the Forecast Ontology).
Working on ontologies in general is complex, especially as various experts need to be involved. These are the knowledge engineers on the one hand and the subject matter experts on the other. The knowledge engineers contribute their knowledge and skills to create an ontology according to the given specifications. The subject matter experts have the knowledge of the subject matter to be represented (semiconductor industry). Both groups are experts in their field and need tools to support efficient collaboration in order to communicate.
