SST-LCI versus ISO/TS 15926-12

Starting point for the development of the SST LCI (Life-Cycle Integration) ontology was the OWL ontology as defined in the international specification:

ISO/TS 15926-12:2018 Industrial automation systems and integration — Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities — Part 12: Life-cycle integration ontology represented in Web Ontology Language (OWL)

In the introduction of ISO/TS 15926-12 we can read:

— … — This document is an implementation of ISO 15926-2 in OWL in which relationships are object properties, datatype properties or annotation properties. This document defines an ontology that is intended to be used with standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) and OWL tools. The ontology has a partition that is OWL DL and that can support reasoning.

Some of the content of ISO 15926-2 has not been included in this document, as follows: — … — approval and status, which are covered by other ontologies and developments within W3C

The main high-level differences of SST-LCI to ISO/TS 15926-12 are:

SST-LCI is not restricted to OWL-DL but takes advantage of OWL-FULL

in particular SST-LCI relies on Punning where sub-properties are also treated as Individuals; only this allows to cover all the capabilities of ISO 10303-2

as a result of the above general purpose OWL reasoning on SST data is not suitable and is also not needed as SST requires certain information to be explicitly expressed in SST data

with SST-LCI properties (aka characteristics) of things are expresses by RDF Properties for individuals, while ISO 15926 prefers to define classes with the same property value (e.g. the class of all the things that are “red”)

SST-LCI refines the concept of rdfs:isDefinedBy in the sub-property lci:isDefinedBy where the domain is another SST-LCI resource (instead of e.g. a web-page for human consumption))

as a result SST-LCI is much more verbose on the Individual level and removes many of the higher level class concepts from ISO/TS 15926-12

As a result about 50% of the terms defined in ISO/TS 15926-12 are directly reflected in the SST LCI ontology, while the other 50% are done somehow differently.