Integrating semantics for diagnosis of manufacturing systems

Trends in novel manufacturing systems lead to an increased level of data availability and smart usage of these data. Nowadays, many approaches are available to use the data, but because of an increased flexibility of the systems the interaction between machines and humans has become a challenge. Humans have to browse through a huge amount of data, need knowledge about the machine and underlying algorithms to interpret the results; they cannot use their known terms for communication, we call it the conceptual gap. The user should be enabled to communicate with the machine on a more abstract level and in a more natural way. Therefore, a natural language layer is introduced to provide users with a familiar interaction interface. Underlying layers contain knowledge about the domain, the machines and how data can be accessed and processed. This enables users' questions such as “Are there any anomalies in the system?” to be answered. Answers are provided in natural language and evaluated with a test set of 204 questions.