Towards a Reference Ontology for Maintenance Work Management.

Maintenance work management is a transactional process relying heavily on an army of planners, schedulers and engineers to identify, prioritise, plan, schedule and analyse work. Much of the work is repetitive but each work order and asset needs individual attention as knowledge about the asset, its operation and maintenance performance is stored as semi-structured or unstructured text in a variety of relational database systems and Excel spreadsheets. There are no standards for the naming of fields in these systems, making data extraction a manual effort. The ability of
ontologies to semantically align these fields and to use reasoning to check that the content of fields is appropriate could transform the maintenance work management effort by reducing human effort and errors. This paper describes the ongoing work of the Maintenance Working Group of the Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF) to develop a set of core notions specific to aintenance work management and aligned to the top-level ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the new IOF ontology.