An ontological approach to structural health monitoring

In the current work, an ontological framework for structural health monitoring (SHM) is discussed. Ontologies are used in disciplines like knowledge engineering and natural language processing, but their structure and goals also fit the purposes of SHM. In SHM projects – as in all projects – many problems arise during knowledge sharing and application. Ontologies can deal with these problems and at the same time have more benefits for SHM processes, as their modularity may assist in extending and transferring knowledge. An SHM-specific ontology is constructed here and described; It contains many objects that can be used in the procedure of monitoring structures. The ontology can also be used as a database to store data acquired, but also serves as a knowledge-base for the current discipline’s algorithms and methods. Further, having close connections to object-oriented programming, ontologies straightforwardly facilitate software development and reusability of their components. Certainly, the ontology can be used to save time during the application of SHM, but also can be applied to improve performance of existing methods, by finding within the ontology the best algorithm to fit the purpose of each method.