Elsevier

Computers in Industry

Volume 71, August 2015, Pages 24-34
Computers in Industry

Review
Semantic annotation for knowledge explicitation in a product lifecycle management context: A survey

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2015.03.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Investigating some existing surveys about semantic annotation researches.

  • Collecting and classifying semantic annotation researches based on Zachman framework.

  • Analysing those collected literatures, especially from formalization aspect.

  • Identifying the existing drawbacks and pointing out the possible research directions.

Abstract

Nowadays, the need for systems interoperability in or across enterprises has become more and more ubiquitous. Many research works have been carried out in the fields of information exchange, transformation, discovery and reuse. One of the main challenges in these researches is to overcome the semantic heterogeneity between enterprise applications along the life cycle of a product. As a possible solution to assist the semantic interoperability, the semantic annotation has gained many attentions and widely used in different domains. We collect a number of literature that applied semantic annotations on different objects, and classify them according to the subject being described in an enterprise architecture framework. A detailed survey, especially from the formalization aspect, is presented to identify the existing drawbacks and to point out the possible research directions.

Introduction

In manufacturing enterprises, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach has been considered as an essential solution for improving the product competitive ability. It aims at providing a shared platform that brings together different enterprise applications at each stage of a Product Life Cycle (PLC) in or across enterprises [1]. Although the main software companies are making efforts to offer a complete and integrated set of systems, most of them do not provide a coherent integration of the entire information system. This results in a kind of “tower of Babel”, where each application is considered as an island in the middle of the ocean of information, managed by stakeholders along the life cycle of a product.

Semantic interoperability is the ability to ensure that the exchanged information has got the same meaning considering the point of view of both the senders and the receivers [2]. In the context of a PLM, stakeholders have to work together on the exchanged information and make decisions based on it. They have different backgrounds, heterogeneous expertise, unique knowledge, particular needs and specific practices, which over increase the difficulty to achieve semantic interoperability [3]. The mutual understanding of the semantics that is embedded inside the exchanged information is the cornerstone in the quest for semantic interoperability. Being a way to realize this enrichment, the semantic explication [4] is not only just attaching the formal and shared terms between stakeholders to make semantics explicit, but also bringing the possibility to perform the semantic reasoning for some further operations.

Several semantic annotation surveys have already been carried out with the focus on the functionality or efficiency aspect of annotation tools. However, little attention has been paid to the in-depth study and comparison of the methods behind those tools. The objective of this paper is to address this existing issue through a detailed survey on a number of semantic annotation literature, which are collected and classified from the PLM perspective. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the definitions of annotation and semantic annotation. Section 3 illustrates and compares the semantic annotation researches being applied on different objects. Section 4 identifies the existing drawbacks and proposes the possible research directions. Section 5 concludes this paper and points out the future work.

Section snippets

Annotation and semantic annotation

The Oxford dictionary defines an annotation as “a note by way of explanation or comment added to a text or diagram”. It has special usages in different contexts. For example, in the software programming, an annotation is represented as a text comment embedded in codes to explain the program. In the mechanical drawing, an annotation is a snippet of text or symbol with specific meanings that illustrates the corresponding annotated part. In the commercial advertising, an annotation is usually used

The investigation of semantic annotation researches

In the last decade, several surveys of semantic annotation researches have already been made with different focuses. Reeve and Han [14] presented a short survey about the classification and evaluation of six semantic annotation platforms. Uren et al. [15] reviewed and classified twenty seven semantic annotation systems according to the knowledge management requirements that they proposed. Mangold [16] presented a categorisation scheme for the classification of ten selected semantic search

Existing drawbacks and possible research directions

As discussed in previous sections, despite lots of efforts have been made in semantic annotation researches, at least, three existing drawbacks can be noted.

The formalization of semantic annotations is not the focus in some of above-mentioned researches [30], [31], [36], [37], [42], where it is only considered as a kind of “is a” association between an annotated element and an ontology concept. Meanwhile, some specific schemas are proposed by some of the rest [8], [9], [27], [33], [35], [38].

Conclusion

In a PLM environment, various kinds of representations are used to capture and describe the knowledge related to a product along its life cycle. During the collaboration, a mutual understanding of the semantics inside these shared and exchanged knowledge representations is the foundation to achieve the semantic interoperability. In this paper, we firstly collect the literature that applied semantic annotations on different objects, and classify them according to the subject being described in

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the financial support provided by the Charles Hermite Research Federation (CNRS FR 3198) in France, the “Région Lorraine” local government in France, the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personal (CAPES) in Brazil, and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR) in Brazil.

Yongxin Liao is a Post-Doc researcher at the Graduate Program in Production Engineering and Systems (PPGEPS), Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), Curitiba, Brazil. He obtained his PhD degree in Automatic from the University of Lorraine in 2013. He obtained his Bachelor degree in Software Engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2008, and his Master degrees in Enterprise Computing and Engineering & Software Engineering from the University of Bordeaux 1 & the Harbin

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    Yongxin Liao is a Post-Doc researcher at the Graduate Program in Production Engineering and Systems (PPGEPS), Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), Curitiba, Brazil. He obtained his PhD degree in Automatic from the University of Lorraine in 2013. He obtained his Bachelor degree in Software Engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2008, and his Master degrees in Enterprise Computing and Engineering & Software Engineering from the University of Bordeaux 1 & the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2010. He specializes in production engineering, Semantic Web, data structuring, algorithm design, and programming.

    Mario Lezoche is an associate professor at the University of Lorraine, where he teaches object-oriented software engineering and database development. He conducts his research on Enterprise Model Interoperability at the Research Centre for Automatic Control (CRAN), Joint Research Unit with CNRS. He graduated at the Roma TRE University in Computer Science Engineering. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science Engineering in 2009. He has good experience in Semantic Web research and in models and semantics for systems interoperability. He is presently working on a conceptualization approach for enterprise information systems interoperability.

    Hervé Panetto is a full Professor of Enterprise Information Systems at the University of Lorraine where he teaches Information Systems modelling and development at the School of Engineering in Information Technology (TELECOM Nancy) and conducts research at the Research Centre for Automatic Control (CRAN), Joint Research Unit with CNRS. His research field is based on information systems modelling for enterprise applications and processes interoperability, with applications in enterprise modelling, manufacturing processes modelling and furniture data modelling. He is author or co-author of more than 80 papers in the field of automation engineering, enterprise modelling and enterprise systems integration and interoperability. He is currently Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee 5.3 “Enterprise Integration and Networking”.

    Nacer Boudjlida is a full Professor at the University of Lorraine and a researcher at the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications (LORIA), Joint Research Unit with CNRS. As a professor, his lectures include the various facets of databases (DBMS, database design, distribution, architecture, administration and so on). As a researcher, his domain of interest includes process modelling and support, distributed and cooperative computing, semantic-based mediated architectures. He authored two books on databases and numerous papers on software systems integration and interoperability, on software process modelling and support.

    Eduardo Rocha Loures is an associate professor at the Graduate Program in Production Engineering and Systems (PPGEPS), Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR), Curitiba, Brazil. He received his Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from the Federal Technological University of Paraná, his Master degree in Informatics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, and his PhD in Industrial Systems from the University of Toulouse. He was a Post-Doc researcher at the Research Centre for Automatic Control (CRAN), with which he maintains an international scientific cooperation supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, Brazil), acting as a technical coordinator. His research interests include automated manufacturing systems, business process management, process aware information systems, and enterprise interoperability assessment.

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