Procedural Knowledge Ontology (PKO)

Slides used for the presentation given by Valentina Carriero on 5 June 2025 at the 22nd International Conference ESWC 2025 (Resource track) about the paper "Procedural Knowledge Ontology (PKO)" .

Preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20634

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-94578-6_19

Abstract: Processes, workflows and guidelines are core to ensure the correct functioning of industrial companies: for the successful operations of factory lines, machinery or services, often industry operators rely on their past experience and know-how. The effect is that this Procedural Knowledge (PK) remains tacit and, as such, difficult to exploit efficiently and effectively. This paper presents PKO, the Procedural Knowledge Ontology, which enables the explicit modeling of procedures and their executions, by reusing and extending existing ontologies. PKO is built on requirements collected from three heterogeneous industrial use cases and can be exploited by any AI and data-driven tools that rely on a shared and interoperable representation to support the governance of PK throughout its life cycle. We describe its structure and design methodology, and outline its relevance, quality, and impact by discussing applications leveraging PKO for PK elicitation and exploitation.