I40GO: A global ontology for industry 4.0

• Global ontologies are points of reference when designing application-specific ontologies for various contexts. • I40GO unifies Industry 4.0 knowledge while harmonizing reusability and usability. • Integrating I40GO in manufacturing systems enhances interoperability, decisionmaking, and context-awareness. Over the last two decades, semantic ontologies have been developed to represent manufacturing data across various domains. These ontologies constitute the knowledge base of manufacturing management systems, which primarily focus on optimizing the manufacturing process and improving its resilience. The ontologies developed in the Industry 4.0 domain are heterogeneous, hindering the interoperability of machines, devices, and applications composing manufacturing systems. Consequently, a demand arises for an ontology that provides common vocabularies to represent the data domains inherent to Industry 4.0. A global Industry 4.0 ontology must be easily reusable in different application contexts. This paper presents I40GO: a global ontology tailored to the Industry 4.0 domain. I40GO structures in layers and modules the knowledge represented in the Industry 4.0 most relevant ontologies. The MODDALS methodology is followed to classify knowledge into different layers. This methodology classifies ontology knowledge into common, variant, and application-specific layers following a similar approach to that of Software Product Lines (SPL). I40GO assists ontology engineers in developing domain-specific ontologies for manufacturing systems and enhances interoperability among applications. This work provides an overview of I40GO, emphasizing its development methodology and its modular and layered structure. Furthermore, it demonstrates the reuse of the I40GO ontology within an Industry 4.0 use case—an architecture for context-aware workflow management.