The report COGITO Data Model and Ontology Definition and Interoperability Design details the methodology and technological infrastructure used to develop the COGITO ontology network, as well as the first version of the ontologies that make up such an ontology network. The development of these ontologies has been aligned with the gathering of requirements and with the specification of the COGITO architecture; since this is an ongoing task, the ontology network will evolve over time.

The current version of the COGITO ontology network consists of three modules, corresponding to the construction itself, the construction process, and the construction resources. These modules have already been conceptualised, implemented, and published in a first version of the COGITO ontologies and will be modified and complemented with new modules as the project progresses. In the previous D3.1 deliverable, several existing ontologies that could be reused in COGITO were identified. However, as checked in the coverage analysis, the project requirements are not directly covered by them. This is something expected since different ontologies (even in the same domain) cover different aspects of their domain and are not focused on covering every potential scenario.

The coverage analysis allowed us to identify that some of the terms that appear in the requirements also appear in the ontologies to a greater or lower extent. This has helped identify some ontologies that are candidates to be reused in COGITO (ETSI SAREF4BLDG, W3C BOT, ifcOWL, and the DICO ontologies) and other ontologies that could be useful in the future if new requirements cover their specific domains. In any case, during the implementation of the three current modules of the COGITO ontology network, it was clear that some ontologies fit our requirements better than others and are the ones reused in practice (W3C BOT, W3C Time, WGS84, ETSI SAREF, and ETSI SAREF4CITY). This highlights the fact that reusing ontologies requires analysing multiple factors beyond coverage, and some of them are not easily quantifiable or even cannot be measured objectively.

In any case, the coverage analysis allowed one to identify potential extensions currently not covered by the analysed ontologies such as: the description of the construction as a whole, the quality of the construction elements, the relevant resources (workers, equipment, and materials) and their relationship with the construction process, and metrics on the construction process such as the achieved quality or the cost of the tasks.

The COGITO ontology network will allow the sharing and interoperability among the different components of the COGITO architecture and especially their communication with the Digital Twin platform.

The next steps will be devoted to continuing the collection of additional ontological requirements from the pilots to iteratively evolve the COGITO ontology network. The COGITO ontology portal serves as a living repository for the different ontologies and contains the latest version of both the developed ontologies and all the related artefacts.

To know more details about the COGITO Data Model and Ontology Definition and Interoperability Design, follow the link HERE! All recent results of the COGITO project are available in the Library of Public Deliverables.