Review Comment:
Technical Comments:
The Introduction does not provide a sufficient overview of the paper; in particular, it does not clearly state the key contributions of the paper. In a sense, I am also a little unclear about the exact nature of these contributions. The author is definitely presenting a new methodology for supporting ontology reuse. In this case, the methodology itself needs to be evaluated.
However, other possible contributions also seem to be implicit in the paper. For example, the design of a new ontology for manufacturing; in this case, the ontology itself should also be evaluated. Yes, the author mentions these points in the Introduction, but they need to be emphasized.
A third point raised in the paper (and the title!) is the question of the minimal expressiveness required to axiomatize the intended semantics of manufacturing processes. This is the least developed idea within the paper, and perhaps the most serious problem with the paper. Does the specification of the competency questions themselves require expressiveness beyond OWL? Does the solution of the competency questions require the additional expressiveness?
If so, what are the specific axioms that cannot be written in OWL?
These are general comments, bit more domain-specific comments can also be made. In particular, consider the competency questions in Section 4.3. Are these really sentences whose entailment require axioms within the ontology, or are they just lookup queries (e.g. SPARQL)?
The author also totally ignores any work in process ontologies (e.g. PSL, Event Calculus). This is particularly striking in the discussion in Section 5 (see lines 27-32 on page 22).
The work of Katsumi needs to be included.
I'm not saying that it solves the entire problem of reuse, and it definitely can be criticized from the perspective of usability in realistic applications. Nevertheless, it provides the formal foundations for many of the observations made by the author in this paper.
Other issues about reusability also need to be explicitly acknowledged. In what sense does searching for ontologies by keywords make sense?
Second, partial reuse -- is it possible to use a module or some other subtheory instead of the entire ontology if no single ontology provides answers to every competency question?
Third, is reuse by modification of existing ontologies better than design ab initio?
This question is alluded to at the end of section 4.4, but the discussion is very superficial.
I am puzzled by the notion of ontology quality presented in Section 4.4.2, and even more puzzled by a notion of ontology quality that is reducible to a quantitative score. This becomes an even bigger problem in Section 4.5, where there are insufficient arguments to justify the claims being made. For example, why is a number like Average Deployment of Concepts useful or even correct? Ontologies are primarily about axiomatizing intended semantics, and these proposed quantitative measure have nothing to do with semantics.
I question the utility of quantitative comparisons (e.g. Tables 5 and 6).
Editorial Comments:
Overall, the writing style can be improved.
There are too many paragraphs that consist of only one or two sentences.
Do these indicate that the ideas are not fully developed, or should some of these paragraphs be combined.
I can't parse the one sentence paragraph at lines 41-43 on page 35.
Should the title be
"Beyond the Expressiveness of OWL for the Representation of Manufacturing Proceeses"?
Recommendation:
The paper cannot be published in its current form.
The author should include more discussion on prior work on ontology reuse and process ontologies.
There is insufficient rigour within the paper.
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