What is Knowledge in Industry 4.0? A Foundational Study

A fundamental study by AMM Sharif Ullah of Kitami Institute of Technology addressing the articulation of knowledge for Industry 4.0. The work reviews definitions from epistemology, engineering design, manufacturing, organization science, information science, and education science. It proposes a definition of knowledge based on claim, provenance, and inference, resulting in four types of knowledge exemplified with real-life scenarios and represented via knowledge graphs.

Use Cases

• Formalizing knowledge for machine learning systems based on the proposed claim-provenance-inference framework.
• Developing knowledge graphs for engineering design and manufacturing based on the exemplified scenarios.
• Digitizing knowledge-intensive activities like acquisition and representation for cyber-physical systems.
• Classifying knowledge types (definitional, deductive, inductive, creative) for cognitive task automation.

Strengths

• The study provides a concrete definition of knowledge consisting of three elements.
• It results in four distinct types of knowledge with real-life examples.
• The outcomes are intended as fundamentals for developing more sophisticated methods and tools.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Kitami Institute of Technology

Collection Method

Literature review and conceptual analysis.