Ontology engineering services
DNV is a leading provider of ontology engineering expertise for industries.
Ontology engineering at DNV
With our background in maritime and oil and gas classification, we have always worked with structured vocabularies and rules. As the complexity and amounts of information increased, we started building digital reference structures. Our work in ontology engineering goes back more than 20 years. With the digitalization and artificial intelligence, the power of ontologies will become even greater, significantly transforming industries. The requirements of the future will be based on ontologies, enabling automatic verification and validation of rules and standards. In addition to developing ontologies for our customers, our ontology engineering team runs joint industry projects (JIPs) and organizes ontology engineering workshops that bring industries and domain experts together.
What is ontology engineering?
An ontology is a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain showing the terms’ properties and the relations between them. In information science, an ontology consists of a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data and entities of the domains. The creation of ontologies allows artificial intelligence (AI) systems to "understand" and evaluate texts (i.e., requirements, regulations) in various written forms as well as more structured information from databases.
Ontology engineering projects in the oil and gas industry
It is possible to make a strategic leap in cost-efficiency and quality by moving away from manual document-based work processes to digitalized and automated processes.
As an example, DNV has collaborated with EPC companies on large-scale ontologies (In some cases consisting of more than 80,000 classes) for representing requirements and specifications.
One of the systems for material master data is used in large capital intensive oil and gas projects, providing greater precision and reduced effort in engineering work processes, thereby reducing total time and cost. According to the EPC provider the effect is an estimated cost reduction of 5 % for bulk material orders, which in large projects amounts to more than EUR 100 million.