Review Comment:
The paper proposes an ontology for describing a type of manufacturing machine (extruder) for performing extrusion processes. The paper describes the ontology design process and the five models that constitute the ontology and briefly explains how each module supports three types of stakeholders - novice workers, designers and domain experts. The described process is interesting and combines concepts and features from other existing ontologies. The proposed ontology has been evaluated from three different points of view - ontology pitfall scanner, ontology quality and ontology metrics. The proposed ontology is documented and its components are available online.
In general, the paper is well written and organised. The proposed ontology is original, interesting and relevant. The authors provide a detailed description of the different modules that constitute the ontology. The illustration of the ontology components is readable and easy to follow. However, there are some points require improvement.
The paper is lacking a related work section. Although the paper (at the beginning of section 2) provides a brief summary of similar ontologies and lists some methodologies for ontology development, however, the authors are encouraged to create a separate section of related work to describe in more detail similar ontologies, ontology development methods and methodologies, and ontology evaluation approaches. This will enable the authors to provide better justification why the NEON ontology development methodology and evaluation approach were chosen (some missing founding works about ontology evaluation approaches are listed below).
Section 2 describes the ontology development process using NEON methodology. In order to provide a better illustration of the development process, I suggest restructuring that section into subsections to describe the main phases of NEON (i.e. subsections to describe Initiation, Design, Implementation and Maintenance of the proposed ontology).
One of the contributions of the proposed ontology is reusability. Although the paper says that the extruder component module can be replaced by a module that describes components of another type of manufacturing machine, however the paper does not provide proper descriptions nor examples of how the different modules of the proposed ontology can be re-used/customised to develop other ontologies for describing other types of manufacturing machines. This can be described in the evaluation section (e.g. extend subsection 4.2 – Adaptability).
In some occasions (e.g. Introduction/4th Paragraph and Section 2/ end of 1st paragraph) the paper mentioned that concepts of the proposed ontology align with concepts/terms from other ontologies. However, the description of the component module in Section 2 indicates that non-ontological resources have been also used to define concepts. This brings the confusion if all (or some) concepts are aligned with the ontological recourses.
The ontology evaluation section does not provide proper justification why three different approaches for evaluation and why those approaches were chosen. What about the evaluation approach in [1] which considers aspects such as: a) gold standard (i.e. find similarities and differences between the current ontology and existing ones); b) application-based (i.e. what are the potential uses and applications of the , and c) Human assessment (i.e. to answer questions such as: can humans recognise all/some concepts?, do humans approve the facts driven from the ontology?, and will human trust the encoded knowledge in the ontology?). What about domain coverage? (i.e. to what extent does the proposed ontology cover concepts and properties required in extrusion process?).
Finally, the paper does not talk about future work. I would add a new paragraph to the conclusion and append extra applications of the proposed ontology.
Minor issues:
Abstract: descriptions about the components of an extruder, the spatial connections… descriptions about components of an extruder, spatial connections… .
Introduction: machine type that performs an extrusion process… machine type (called extruder) that performs an extrusion process…
Introduction. I assume that the development of a visual query system is one of the contributions of this paper and thus the paragraph “Finally, an ontology …” should be added to the two previous contributions (i.e. 3) the development of an ontology-based query system will ….).
Section 2. P2: we did not found any ontology that described industrial we did not found any ontology that describes industrial.
Suggested references
[1] Brank et al. A survey of ontology evaluation techniques. SIKDD’05
[2] Sabou & Fernandez, Ontology (network) evaluation. Ontology Engineering in Networked World, 2012.
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