Chemical Manufacturing Ontology

CHAD STAHL

What is it? What is the purpose?

The Chemical Manufacturing Ontology is an ontology project which aims to create standardization among the various chemical manufacturers.

The ontology is broken down into several major sections; Manufacturers, Products, Qualities, Molecular Entities and Roles.

How would it be used?

Standardization: Keeping products organized among the four major branches of the chemical industry.

Simplicity: Inputs of a particular chemical can be listed on the ontology, as well as the actual processes and ratios needed to create such chemicals.

Aid in understanding each product.

What other ontologies were used?

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) developed by Dr. Smith and Pierre Grenon.It provided a formal structure to the

ontology, as well as annotation properties and description information.

Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (CheBI) Ontology, which was useful for providing in-depth information regarding chemical entities and properties.

Upper-Level Class ExampleUpper-level usage of the

BFO format, utilizing the Continuant class-tree.

All super-classes created for the Chemical Manufacturing Ontology.

Annotation and Description properties.

Industry Class Example Part of Industry class,

showing potential producers or end-users of chemical products.

Annotation and Description properties.

Inputs, industries and outputs.

Industry: Petroleum Industry Information

Product Class Example Sub-class down the

Product class-tree, Ethanethiol.

An Aroma Compound used in the making of LPG (Butane or Propane).

Just one example of chemical product which can be organized this way.

Usage Example

The LPG class utilizing Ethanethiol.

Gives an overview of how the Role class is utilized throughout this ontology, as well as an overview of the Consumer Product class.

Product Class Product class is the largest collection of classes, but

only a fraction of the almost 70,000 individual chemical products in this industry.

The four major chemical branches are listed below. They are separated based on their intended use and customerBasic Chemical ProductsConsumer Chemical ProductsLife Science ProductsSpecialty Chemical Products

Quality-Standard Class Quality Standards

among various Industries.

The example highlighted is the International Organization for Standardization, used across various industries.

Applications

As stated before, it is my hope that this ontology can aid in:

Standardization of chemical classification among the industry, removing any cases of multiple inheritance which may persist in the chemical industry.

Simplification of the creation of and uses for chemical products.

That this project may serve as a free basic format for any organization hoping to expand upon the current listings or add to the format with professional expertise.

Issues/Problems Only one major issue: multiple inheritance due to relaxed definitions

of where a product may fall into. The majority of chemical product groupings in this ontology were

derived from where the product is more likely to be used. Many chemical products are sold to down-stream chemical

manufacturers (these fall into the Specialty or Basic Industrial categories).

In some cases these two overlap (Detergents, Surfactants, etc.) and the categorization is difficult.

A solution to this would be to implement a larger selection of Roles for very generic terms (soaps, detergents) and cut these terms out of the Product classes.

Questions?