Digital transformation of manufacturing record books : an ontology-based case study

Abstract

Manufacturers in the oil and gas industry face increasing documentation requirements of assets for compliance, quality assurance and contractual purposes. The documentation includes hundreds of documents for each asset that are compiled into a Manufacturer Record Book (MRB) to be delivered with the asset. The MRB is created by collecting all necessary documents and storing them in the MRB as scanned copies in PDF format. Creating an MRB is a cumbersome, error-prone and time-consuming activity. Using an MRB in PDF format is equally hard as it requires humans to search and extract data. Several initiatives have been undertaken by joint industrial projects and standardization agencies to represent the documents by their data in a language understandable to computers and humans. It has been proven that ontologies are effective tools in digitalization by making data from diverse sources interoperable. This paper presents a case study of MRB digitalization for CodeIT, a company developing software solutions for industrial applications. The focus is on creating an ontology for a welding certificate, following an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) procedure that extracts data from a welding certificate in PDF format and uses the ontology for transforming the data into subject-predicate-object triples in a Resource Description Framework (RDF) model. The results demonstrate the applicability of ontologies for digital transformations. Keywords: manufacturing record Book, ontology, interoperability, FAIR principles, digitalization