Assessment of the Ontological Approach in Factory Automation from the Perspectives of Connectionism

This paper is aimed to discuss the abilities of the ontologies to describe a human like structure of knowledge and propose some visions on how the ontologies can be developed in accordance to the lessons from the cognitive psychology. The needs of intelligent industrial environment require the solution for replacement of technical expertise of engineers. The ontological approach is claimed to be a suitable tool to represent engineering knowledge. However, the ontologies were created in base of semantic networks, which are criticized for several restrictions in knowledge representation and reasoning abilities. In the authors' opinion, the connectionist approach, which gives more explanations for the working of human mind, can be potentially useful in creating of knowledge bases in intelligent manufacturing.