7th IFAC Conference on Manufacturing Modelling, Management,

and Control
International Federation of Automatic Control
June 19-21, 2013. Saint Petersburg, Russia

A Semantic Mapping Approach to Retrieve Manufacturing Information

Resources: 670LFURHOHFWURQLFV¶ FDVH VWXG\
S. Bouzid*,**. C. Cauvet*. C. Frydman*
J. Pinaton**

*Laboratory for Systems and Information Sciences (LSIS), University of Aix-Marseille, France
France (e-mail: sara.bouzid@lsis.org;corine.cauvet@lsis.org;claudia.frydman@lsis.org).
**STMicroelectronics, Rousset area, France
(e-mail:sara.bouzid@st.com;jacques.pinaton@st.com)

Abstract: Controlling a manufacturing process in a company requires using same manufacturing

indicators among company engineers. However, the generalization of Commercial Off-The-Shelf
systems in manufacturing companies to get such indicators has rapidly entailed the increase of the
quantity of manufacturing information resources, where a resource represents an indicator in a specific
format. As a consequence, retrieving such resources has become a real challenge for the engineers
because these resources usually lack of semantic description. We propose in this paper a semantic
mapping approach to associate business semantics to the resources during their search. The core contents
of the approach are presented in general and an implementation example is given.
Keywords: Resource Retrieval, Mapping, Semantic Approach, Manufacturing Indicator

the related works. The fourth section describes the semantic

1. INTRODUCTION
With the growing need of monitoring manufacturing
processes in industrial companies, sharing and using same
manufacturing information ±such as control indicators±
among company engineers is necessary to efficiently ensure
this task. The use of off-the-shelf distributed systems has
become common in many industries, because of their ability
to provide a flexible management and maintenance of the
manufacturing data. However, the extensive use of these
systems by the end users often lead to manufacturing-
indicDWRUV¶ overflow. In fact, such systems provide a wide
range of functionalities (data extraction, analysis, reporting,
etc.), which often overlap. Company engineers can get in this
way several calculations of indicators with several formats.
They entail the increase of the number of information
resources because each indicator in a specific format is a
resource. As a consequence, to use a manufacturing indicator,
an engineer must spend a lot of time in searching in resource
repositories, sometimes without effective results, even by
using a search engine. The main reason behind this difficulty
is that these resources usually lack of descriptive meta-data
that give a sense to the resources. This meaningful
description is known as semantics. We try within
STMicroelectronics to improve the retrieval of the
manufacturing information (MI) resources using a semantic
mapping approach. This approach relies on a manufacturing
process ontology and a process-control dictionary to find
correspondences between an indicator stored in a resource
repository and its relationship with the control of the
manufacturing process.
The outline of this paper is as follows. The second section
introduces the problem description. The third section presents
mapping approach. Finally, the last section presents an
implementation example with the validation technique used
in the STMicroelectronics Company.
2. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
Controlling manufacturing processes with a set of indicators
enables industrial companies to ensure a continuous control
of their activities. The process control relies on a set of
standard tools and methods established in manufacturing
companies to guarantee the use of reliable and efficient
indicators by company engineers. The complexity of the
information system in such companies leads them to use
Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)1 distributed systems for
engineering data management and analysis, so to facilitate the
access to manufacturing data to the engineers. Moreover, the
modular and distributed aspect of these systems allows easy
adaptation to changes and reduces long-term maintenance
costs. However, their extensive use to produce manufacturing
information and indicators can lead to a MI-resource
overflow.
Indeed, the study of the information system within
STMicroelectronics points out this problem of information-
resource overflow. STMicroelectronics is a manufacturing
company which uses COTS systems for the control of its
activity (production of electronic chips). These systems have
diverse components which offer several functionalities that
can overlap. Therefore, an engineer can get and process data
in different ways, entailing the increase of the MI resources
1
COTS are specialized software, designed for specific applications such as
medical billing, chemical analysis, statistical analysis, etc. They can be used
with little or no modification

978-3-902823-35-9/2013 © IFAC 2069 10.3182/20130619-3-RU-3018.00201

2013 IFAC MIM
June 19-21, 2013. Saint Petersburg, Russia
in the company. We found within STMicroelectronics more
than 20 kinds of data management, analysis and reporting
systems. Examples of used systems are Business Object for
reporting, Kla ace xp for data analysis and statistical
calculation, Apf for real time data extraction and reporting
and so on (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Examples of COTS systems within
STMicroelectronics
Actually, there is an average of 200 to 400 resources by each
system. As a consequence, it is almost impossible for an
engineer to retrieve an indicator among the available huge
quantity stored in resource repositories. In fact, because these
resources essentially contain figures (e.g., flow charts,
histograms, etc.) and numerical data, they usually lack of
semantics. Commercial data management systems were
generally designed in a way to enable an easy access and
process of data with fewer considerations about how to share
and retrieve the produced resources. Hence, using a
document management system or a search engine will not
improve the retrieval of such resources as long as they still
lack semantics. We are trying to address this lack through a
semantic approach.
3. RELATED WORKS
The issue of semantic retrieval of resources in manufacturing
companies has become an emerging field of study. First
semantic-based techniques have been applied to web search.
With the emergence of ontology paradigm, semantic
techniques have shown interest in other fields such as in
software-component retrieval (Y. Peng et al. 2009; Alnusair
& Zhao 2010), in document retrieval (Vdovjak & Houben
2010) and in knowledge management systems (Cubranic et
al. 2003). Few research works tackle the MI-resource
retrieval because such kind of resources is specific to
industries and needs specific semantics. There is a recent
work of Li & Qiao (2012) about manufacturing-information
retrieval. The authors proposed an ontology for
manufacturing information and showed its usefulness using
the web engine of their data management system. There are
other similar works focusing on the retrieval of engineering
documents. McMahon et al. (2004) developed an integrated
retrieval system where engineering documents can be
annotated using pre-identified concepts and retrieved using a
faceted-classification mechanism. Finally, Yao et al. (2009)
proposed an integrated environment for engineering-
information retrieval using an engineering ontology. This one
2070
realizes the mapping between user queries and engineering
documents.
Most of the research works that use a semantic retrieval
process emphasize the use of one or many business
ontologies. Such ontologies give a description of a domain
as a whole, without differentiating between business
semantics and the linguistic aspect. We propose in our
approach to separate the business description of a domain
from the definition of its vocabulary. In addition, a specific
combined string similarity technique is used in the mapping
approach to broaden the scope of matching of concepts.
4. THE SEMANTIC MAPPING APPROACH
4.1 Approach overview
The proposal tries to improve the MI-resource retrieval using
semantic description of the resources. To that aim, we
developed an approach to automatically identify business
descriptions for MI resources. Because these resources aim at
controlling a manufacturing process, our goal is to determine
their relevance to the process control. A process-control
dictionary referencing the main terminologies of the process-
control domain (standard methods, standard indicators, etc.)
is used. A manufacturing process ontology related to the
business activity of the company is also used. Afterwards, the
mapping process is based on a semantic mapping algorithm
which uses string similarity and statistical similarity
techniques. These techniques allow identifying as best as
possible an accurate business description for a given resource
(Fig. 2).
The main purpose of such a mapping technique is to enable
company engineers to easily access to MI resources and to
use them for their business needs. They can explore and
retrieve a resource according to its description and regardless
of its location in the company network. This approach can
also be used to reference the resources with their description,
like a resource annotation system.
Fig. 2. The semantic mapping approach
The proposed approach can be summarized in four steps.
The first step is to identify the business description that will
make the resources closer to the manufacturing objectives of
the company. A meta-model for MI-resource description is
provided for this purpose. This meta-model is also used to
prepare an expert model, which is a manual description of a
set of selected resources. We validate thereby the resulting
semantic description.
2013 IFAC MIM
June 19-21, 2013. Saint Petersburg, Russia
The second step of the approach focuses on gathering the
business concepts, terminologies, relationships between
concepts and all the vocabulary that will help in building the
semantic description of the resources. A process-control
dictionary and a manufacturing process ontology are
proposed. The process-control dictionary provides the
vocabulary of concepts that makes the link between the raw
description of the resources and the targeted business
semantic. Note that this dictionary is related to the process-
control domain because the involved indicators in this
approach are used for the manufacturing process control in
general. The manufacturing process ontology is a global
business description of the manufacturing activity. It provides
the link between the process-control methods used in the
company and the manufacturing process description.
The third step in our approach is the mapping process. It
consists in mapping the basic raw description that a resource
can have (for example, its name, its location) with the
concepts of the dictionary and the ontology. After several
processing steps, the mapping system returns an estimated
description of the manufacturing resources.
The final step in the proposed approach consists in validating
the resulting description using the expertV¶ GHVFULSWLRQ.
An overview of each step is presented in the next sub-
sections.
4.2 The resource description meta-model
Fig. 3 depicts the meta-model that we defined within
STMicroelectronics for the MI-resource description.
Fig. 3. The meta-model for MI-resource description
A resource can have two types of descriptive concepts:
business ones and operational ones. The manufacturing
objective is a kind of business description. The control
indicator and the control domain are kinds of operational
descriptions.
The indicator represents the main subject of a resource. It is
mainly composed of data objects which can be related to the
manufacturing process or to the process-control domain or
ERWK )RU H[DPSOH LI ZH WDNH WKH LQGLFDWRU ³control chart on
lot´ the control chart is a concept in the process-control
domain and the lot is a manufacturing concept. This indicator
can be provided with a temporal dimension, such as daily,
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weekly, etc. This dimension represents the time period from
which manufacturing data were collected. Finally an
indicator has an output form which refers to its visual
representation. For example, a trend or a control chart are
kinds of output forms.
The control domain can be a method or an objective of the
process-control domain in general. Examples of process-
control methods implemented within STMicroelectronics are
SPC, FDC, Run to Run, Sampling, etc. Main standard
process-control methods are based on statistical techniques.
The control indicators are defined and calculated within the
company by using these methods for a specific
manufacturing objective. Thus, the manufacturing objective
represents the business purpose addressed by the MI
resources.
4.3 The process-control dictionary
The proposed dictionary gives the required terminologies of
the process-control domain. Linguistic dictionaries, such as
the famous WordNet2, are so much generic for process-
control concepts. For example a generic dictionary can give
the definition of statistics, of a process and of the control, but
it cannot give the meaning of the statistical process control
(SPC), whereas SPC is a standard process-control method.
Our dictionary aims at defining these specific terminologies.
It is based on the following meta-model (Fig. 4) which uses
some generic concepts of linguistic dictionaries (i.e.
synonym, hypernym, hyponym).
Fig. 4. The meta-model of the process-control dictionary
The process-control dictionary is composed of a list of
concepts representing the entries of the dictionary. Each
concept may have a synonym or a variant. Note that a variant
represents another form of a concept, like an abbreviation.
For example, the out-of-control concept is also known as
OOC.
A concept has some relation types. Examples of these
relations are: hypernym and hyponym. The hypernym is a
concept that encompasses another concept, such a kind of
generalization. The hyponym is a kind of specialization. If we
take again the concept out of control, its hypernym is SPC.
2
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
2013 IFAC MIM
June 19-21, 2013. Saint Petersburg, Russia
Finally, each concept in the dictionary is defined with a set of
key concepts. They serve to provide the scope of definition of
the involved concept. For example the concept out of control
is, in fact, a process-control indicator. Limit, target and
control chart are examples of key concepts that define its
scope.
4.4 The manufacturing process ontology
$Q RQWRORJ\ LV ³DQ H[SOLFLW VSHFLfication of a
FRQFHSWXDOL]DWLRQ´ (Gruber 1993). It represents a description
of a domain of knowledge or discourse. Ontologies have been
created to improve the communication between humans,
between humans and computers and between computers by
offering a unique and standardized vocabulary. According to
the semantic mapping purpose, we developed a
manufacturing process ontology for STMicroelectronics to
get a standard description of its business process. This
ontology relies on four views (Fig. 5):
- Organization view: references the business activities
of the company
- Function view: describes the manufacturing
objectives of the company for each business activity
- Control view: describes the process-control
objectives and methods as implemented within the
company.
- Data view: gathers the data types involved in the
manufacturing process
Fig. 5. The upper concepts of the manufacturing process
ontology
These views refer in fact to the descriptive levels of the ARIS
architecture (Ferdian 2001). They were chosen as a starting
point for the domain description because the ARIS approach
seeks to reduce the complexity of modeling business
processes using those levels, besides that the ontology has
been built with a top down strategy.
The manufacturing process ontology and the process-control
dictionary are linked through the process-control methods. In
fact, the process-control dictionary gives the link between a
raw description of an indicator in a resource and the process-
control domain (including process-control methods,
objectives, correlated concepts with the domain and so on),
whereas the manufacturing process ontology gives the link
between a process-control concept and how it is used in the
manufacturing activity. In the last case, the semantic relations
between the data view, the control view and the function
view are decisive in building this link.
4.5 The mapping process
2072
The mapping approach seeks to automatically find a semantic
description, referenced in the ontology, for a MI resource.
Note that we mean by the term mapping here, to find
associations or correspondences between at least two
concepts. Mapping approaches are widely used in ontology-
based works when an ontology needs to be created by
mapping two ontology structures (Pirrò & Talia 2007; Ehrig
& Staab 2004). The mapping notion is also used in
information retrieval on the web, in document retrieval and
component retrieval systems (Vdovjak & Houben 2010). In
these systems, the user query is generally mapped with the
available data and information. String similarity techniques
are used to map information with the vocabulary associated
to the processed data and knowledge (Pellegrino & Corno
2006; S. Li & Qiao 2012). Business ontologies and linguistic
dictionaries are also used in this context to enhance the
matching of user queries. In our approach, we combine
semantic analysis with string similarity techniques. The
following mapping techniques are applied:
String similarity measuring: it consists in the syntactic
matching of concepts. There is a set of well-known string
similarity functions in the literature, including edit-distance,
Jaro-winkler, Jaccard similarity, TF-IDF, and so forth (F. Lin
2007). We use the edit-distance function, also known as
Levenshtein distance. In the mapping process, this function
calculates the distance between each concept of the resource
name and the concepts of the dictionary. The best edit-
distance under a given threshold between two concepts is
selected. After several experimentations we set the threshold
to 0.7. This distance is combined with another string
similarity function called the dice coefficient (D. Lin 1998).
This one returns an average similarity coefficient between
two sets of concepts (instead of two concepts).
Reasoning-based technique: this technique relies on
searching the target description using the semantic relations
between the concepts that are defined in the manufacturing
process ontology.
Our approach actually focuses on identifying the generic
concepts that describe a resource in the proposed meta-model
(Fig. 3), which are the key indicator, the control domain and
the manufacturing objective. For example, taking the
UHVRXUFH QDPH ³ooc analysis by equipment´ E\ PDSSLQJ
these concepts with our approach, the system must obtain the
following results:
Indicator: <ooc>
Control domain: <SPC>
Manufacturing objective: <Lot control>
Fig. 6 summarizes the mapping process. The resource name
represents the starting point in the approach. We try at the
beginning to tokenize the resource name and eliminate the
stop words. Tokenzing means to transform a string to simple
tokens. For example:
<ooc-analysis> : ooc> <analysis>
Example of eliminating stop words:
<ooc analysis by equipment> : <ooc> <analysis>
<equipment>
2013 IFAC MIM
June 19-21, 2013. Saint Petersburg, Russia
The string similarity function combines the edit-distance
function and the dice coefficient, so to get a better mapping
result between the concepts of the resource name and the
concepts of the dictionary. This step enables to find out the
key indicator that represents the subject of the resource, and
suggests the corresponding control domain. Once the control
domain is identified, the system searches all the relationships
around this concept in the manufacturing process ontology,
according to its four descriptive views. This step focuses on
logical reasoning on the relations between concepts in the
ontology. The system tries in that way to infer the
corresponding manufacturing objective.
Fig. 6. Overview of the mapping process
5. IMPLEMENTATION AND VALIDATION
The general approach has been experimented within
STMicroelectronics on a set of 384 heterogeneous resources
(from analysis and reporting tools). A mapping module has
been developed using the Php technology for the user
interface. The C language was also used for string similarity
calculation. The manufacturing process ontology and the
process-control dictionary have been implemented using the
xml technology. The mapping system takes as input any
location of a resource repository in the company network and
produces as output the semantic description of these
resources (cf. Appendix A). The types of descriptions are pre-
identified in the beginning of the approach (with the resource
meta-model) and are taken from the ontology during the
mapping process (Fig. 6).
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The experimentation of the approach showed good results
with an average of 90% of precision and 85% of recall. Such
results required several experimentations and corrections in
the semantic models, as well as in the mapping process. The
validation process is done manually in csv files. In fact, the
system automatically exports the results in csv files each time
a mapping is done. This output is then compared with the
H[SHUWV¶ GHVFULSWLRQ Fig. 7). In this way, the validation is
done progressively for each panel of resources selected
within the company. The aim of the validation step is to
evaluate the effectiveness of the mapping techniques, and to
check the coherency of the dictionary and the ontology, up to
stabilizing their content. The limit of this technique is that it
is time consuming, in particular, when there are a lot of
resources to describe. However, in such a context, only the
business experts have the necessary knowledge to validate
the results.
Fig. 7. Validation technique
6. CONCLUSION
This paper presents a semantic mapping approach to enhance
the retrieval of MI resources in industries. This approach
gives the guidelines to search and add semantics to these
resources basing on four main elements: a meta-model for
MI-resource description, a process-control dictionary, a
manufacturing process ontology and a mapping process.
These elements enabled to obtain a novel search approach to
explore and retrieve MI resources in industries. Furthermore,
comparing to the existing works, only our approach provides
business description in the search results. This description is
centralized in a dictionary and an ontology, which, somehow,
unify the vocabulary used in an activity domain. As a result,
the end users can better explore and understand the existing
indicators in resource repositories, instead of developing new
ones. Also, the problem of resource overflow can be
progressively reduced.
The experimentation of our approach within
STMicroelectronics showed its effective application and
identified a promising solution over time. Our contribution
also pinpointed a lack of research works in the field of
semantic-based-resource retrieval in manufacturing
companies.
Future works focus on improving the validation method of
the approach. Giving guidelines for the maintaining of the
2013 IFAC MIM
June 19-21, 2013. Saint Petersburg, Russia
dictionary and the ontology must also be considered, in order
to regularly ensure a consistent semantic content over time.
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