Ontology-based

Knowledge Management
in the Steel Industry
Chapter 11
B. Ramamurthy

Introduction
An

important aspect for businesses is

knowledge and intelligence generation and
management.
Right knowledge and intelligence is important
for right and timely decisions.
We will discuss the approach used by steel
industry to address knowledge and
intelligence management.
2

Steel Industry Context

Arcelor Mittal: worlds number one steel company

330,000 employees
60 countries
Geographical diversity: Industrial activities in 27
countries across Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa.
Arcelor Research Knowledge Innovation (KiN)
Center aims to classify, model and put into service
the knowledge of this group.
Knowledge-intensive tasks steer business processes
(how?)
Business processes are realized using services (WS)
in the implementation (how?)
3

Critical Business areas

Business optimizations: supply chain, sales,

purchasing, marketing
Customer solutions based on knowledge (ex: China
is hosting Olympics steer business to pay
attention to customer needs in this region).
Industrial process support: Factory-wide, line
piloting, process models
Cross-cutting service assistance (transversal
service assistance) (ex: services spanning multiple
domains)
4

Solution basis
Data

mining
Knowledge-based systems
Simulations of optimization techniques
Semantic web
ArcelorMittal collaborates with CTIC
Foundation for semantic web related
activities.
Together they provide steel industry standard
for W3C semantic web activity
5

Motivation and Use Cases

Knowledge

capitalization tools
Unified data description layer
Supply chain management: raw materials to
finished products
Ontologies are not new: used for knowledge
representation
Ontologies will be used here to integrate:
6

Ontologies for integration

Structural clarity : hierarchical structure vs. RDBMS

Human understanding
Maintainability
Reasonability: infer new knowledge
Flexibility
Interoperability (OWL suite)
In summary, ontology is a powerful tool for
knowledge management, information retrieval and
extraction, and information exchange in agentbased as well as in interactive systems.
7

Knowledge Capitalization

Group of applications devoted to manage content,

documents, and information, structured so that
users can access knowledge, add and modify them.
Content management systems, document
management systems, wikis, dynamic web portals,
search engines, etc.
What is required?

Ontologies and tools to exploit them

tools: semantic search, human resources networking and
management
8

Knowledge capitalization: human

resources and networking

Human resources in multinational company

Departments need to exchange professional
information: contacts, employee profiles, etc.
Typically reside in departments hard drive
HRMS: Human Resource Management System: to
describe people, job requirements & qualifications.
Extensive Ontologies and taxonomies are available:

Hierarchy
E-recruitment
Experts Assignment
9

Unified data description layer

Huge

company built from many smaller

companies incrementally
All kinds of software + widely varying levels
of usages
XML has emerged as a syntactical solution
for inter-application data communication

10

XML can dos and not

Promotes reuse (XML parsers)

XML instances can be checked for syntactical
correctness against grammar (XML Schema)
Can be queried (XQuery, XPath)
Can be transformed (XSL)
Can be wrapped using commodity protocols (web
services)
However they convey only structure they are
meaningless (no semantics)
Ontologies have the potential to fix this situation by
providing precise machine-readable semantic
descriptions of the data.
11

Adding Semantics to content

How to do it?
Managing legacy DB:

Choice 1: transform into relational db to ontology collections

(R2O)
Choice 2: Wrap relational databases with semantic
interfaces

Steel producers use models and simulation tools to

predict or control impact of various events: semantics
can help in re-use of many existing models across
departments, countries and organizations.
Distributed searches: can index multiple repositories,
esp. in multilingual environments
12

Supply Chain Management

(SCM)

Supply chain is a coordinated system of organizations, people,

processes, and resources involved in moving a product or
service from suppliers to customers.
In AM (ArcelorMittal) is indeed quite complex
Independent business units
Mitigate delays in production process
Variances in production times and product quality
Managing orders and sub-orders
Heterogeneous processes
Supply chain modeling and simulation
Highly dynamic
Most data reside in heterogeneous systems
Islands of automation
Need to form a global model
13

SCM Solution at AM

Ontology engineering to support supply chain

modeling
Identify data and knowledge required for specific
model
Develop mechanisms to extract the above
information
Populate Ontologies with required knowledge
Build simulation models and implant a generic
procedure to fill the necessary input values
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A Business process
Abstraction
AM

will use Supply Chain Operation

Reference (SCOR) model developed by
supply chain council.
Ontology will be developed based on SCOR.
SCOR is structured around five processes:
Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Return

All these can be semantic (composite) web

services in the model

Processes

are decomposable
15

Ontology for Business

processes
Ontology

will address categories of the supply

knowledge:
Process: process cost, process quality
Resource: capacity of resource
Inventory: control policy
Order: demand or order quantity, due dates
Planning: forecast methods, order schedule
Develop supply chain ontology: help
simulations and future system designs.
16

Modeled Factory and

Metallurgical Routes

Application of ontology design and semantic web.

A metallurgical route involves set of processes (realized using web
services) from order to production.
How can it help? What was the situation before introduction of
semantics?

Lack of modularity
Lack of standards
Lack of integration between business models and production rules

Solution: formal description of the concepts that occur in metallurgical

routes.

All concepts are formalized as ontology classes.

These concepts or blueprints have to be agreed upon by different plants.
This framework represents a common understanding of the products and
production lines.

17

Semantic Metallurgical route:

HotRollingMill

Maximum/minimum entrance width

Maximum/minimum exit width
Productivity
Thickness reduction capacity
Input material is of type Slab
Output material is of type HotRoll
Adding semantic enabled each facility to add values to a semantic
instance of the concept.
Web services could query the facilities before processing orders (p.255):
that is HotRollingMill will be available via a web service to the
applications that need its information details.
Ontology is centrally developed, and instances are kept at decentralized
locations and served by WS.
More intelligence is embedded in WS through addition of semantic to
data results in less number of rules.
Here is an example of services-enabled enterprise (AM).
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AM, The Ultimate Serviceenabled Enterprise

Semantic search: Ontologies, metadata, thesauri

and taxonomies (ARIADNE project)
H.R. and networking: Ontologies, international
classifications and rules
Unified data description layer: Ontologies and data
mediation
Expert knowledge and industry process modeling:
Ontologies and rules
Supply chain management: Ontologies, SCOR
model, semantic web services, rules
Modeled factory: Ontologies and rules (metallurgical
routes, Visonto)
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Practical Experiences

Ontologies are powerful mechanisms to capture

knowledge.
Knowledge is key factor in productivity.
Sharing knowledge among employees perform
similar tasks
Overall productivity can be improved by transfer of
knowledge from experienced employees to
inexperienced ones.
This is needed for spanning the gap in multilingual
world, to improve understanding and productivity
and to avoid industrial accidents and to provide best
practices.
20

Expert Knowledge and

Industrial Process Modeling

Metal working and factory modeling: how to manage bottlenecks,

solve inventory, and work in progress problems like line
stoppages, and material defects, optimize production rates,
determine plant capacity etc.
Solution: build a shared ontological abstraction of metallurgical
concepts and to use it as an interoperable framework in
production lines and product life cycle management.
An ontology that focuses on process, equipments, problematic
and best practices of continuous annealing line has been built.
Different models are developed at different production lines
which share many concepts; there is need for reuse and
interoperability.
Solution: ontology based services-enabled framework
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Generic Production Line

(p.2527-258)
Process
Performs/
Performed by
Line

Is composed of/
is component of
Tool

Equipment

Supplies/
Supplied by
Products

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Enhancing Ontology Reuse

and Interoperability

Ontology language: (OWL-Full, OWL-DL, OWL-Lite)

OWL-DL (Description Language) was chosen for its
expressiveness and for its support of computational
completeness and decidability.
Common semantics: need to share same
vocabulary and points of view.
Meta-modeling: multi-layering of concepts: highest
level described more general concepts and the
lowest specific for each line; intermediate layers
describe common processes and equipment and
tools.
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Ontology Meta-model
High-level ontology (meta-model)

Component
Library

Line
Model

Line
Model

Component
Library

Line
Model

Common/shared

Line
Model

Line specifics

24

Usage of Ontologies

Used for streamlining industrial equipment to perform steel

fabrication
Also help staff to maintain devices, control of processes, test
product quality and other operations involving human
intervention.
RDF model allows information (from experts) as web resources.
OWL has a annotation feature to add metadata information to
any resource of an ontology.
Ex: rdfs: comment, rdfs: seeAlso
Also applying a social network enhances the utility of the factory
ontology.
Experts share the same model of the whole process and they
can interchange information and documents by means of the
ontology.
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Visonto: A tool for ontology

visualization

Ontology authoring: protg?

No, they developed their own in collaboration with CTIC
foundation.
Can be customized within the ontology.
View: tree view heavily linked to web pages for knowledge
dissemination
Multilinguism is a key feature: language-agnostic for domain
knowledge with annotation in multiple languages, other subtle
details such as units of measurement, monitory units and
dates/time etc.
Simple string-search based search; query-based search based
on SPRQL.
Query by example interface: a good choice
Filter of information through points of view and other filters.
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Visonto Architecture
Visonto

is a web application, without any

substantial software installed by the client.
Knowledge sharing and collaborative
environment. A common pool of Ontologies
and comments.
Long term plan involves adding reasoners,
semantic web services.

27

Visonto Architecture

JSF
Web
Interface

Application
services

Syntactic
search

Ontology
Repository

Semantic
Queries

Ontology
access

Business
Objects

Comment
persistence

View
engine

Favorite
persistence

Ontologies

Data base

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ARIADNE: Enrichment of
syntactic search

Another internal project

Verity/autonomy K2 product
Indexing spider gathers and builds repositories of all
internal documents
J2EE web user interface was built on top of the
search engine API.
Result is a powerful capitalization of company
information.
Web interface in Java and Jena framework.
Search comparison in multiple languages.
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Open Issues
Development

of large ontologies
Semantic web services
Combining ontologies and rules
Development of more tools for leveraging
knowledge base

30