How to download the manufacturing ontology for integrating with my digital twins models from GitHub?

Question

I am working on my digital twins models for a simulated manufacturing environment. I've found a manufacturing ontology on GitHub, but I don't know how to download and import it into my project.

The GitHub repository is https://github.com/digitaltwinconsortium/ManufacturingOntologies, and it appears to contain the ontology I need. However, I'm relatively new to using GitHub and would appreciate some guidance on the following:

What is the recommended method for downloading this manufacturing ontology from the GitHub repository?

Are there any specific branches or releases I should be aware of, or is the master branch typically the one to use?

Once I've downloaded the ontology, what steps should I follow to integrate it into my digital twins models?

Are there any best practices or considerations I should keep in mind when working with external ontologies in the context of digital twins?

Any advice, step-by-step instructions, or recommended tools and libraries for handling this process would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your assistance!

What I tried: I visited the GitHub repository mentioned in the question and could not find the manufacturing ontology file to download the ontology.

What I expected to happen: I expected to find a folder with the applicable files. I would be able to extract the ontology files from it and then import them into my digital twins models.

What actually resulted: I found that it contained the entire repository, including source code, documentation, and various other files. I was unsure if I had found the right URL.

I'm seeking guidance on the recommended method for downloading the manufacturing ontology (if available in the mentioned URL), ensuring I have the correct files, and effectively importing them into my digital twins models.

Answer 1

welcome to the community! The GitHub resource you have provided is meant to act as a guide for building a solution on manufacturing ontology using OPC UA Cloud publisher among various other sources as data source. The repository offers guidance on a complex architecture which might be involved in manufacturing scenarios. You certainly do not have to follow the same architecture provided in the repository.

According to the documentation What is an ontology?, "An ontology is a set of models that comprehensively describe a given domain, like manufacturing, building structures, IoT systems, smart cities, energy grids, web content, and more." Assuming you are looking for model definitions to import into your Digital Twin instance, you can find them under the Ontologies directory. There are no specific branches you would need to download. The easiest way to obtain this is by Choosing the Download zip option by clicking on code on the repository page. This will get you a local copy of the repository contents. Alternatively, you can use the GitHub command git clone https://github.com/digitaltwinconsortium/ManufacturingOntologies from command prompt/bash to clone the repository to your local directory. You can keep a copy of Ontologies directory and delete the rest.

Now that you have the models downloaded, you may inspect and import all models or just a few of them based on your use case. You can use an SDK or Jobs API to import the models. Once the models are imported, you can create Digital twins of these models. Please refer the resource Ingest IoT Hub telemetry into Azure Digital Twins to get more details on how to ingest telemetry data from IoT Hub to a digital twin. You can use this approach to simulate data instead of using the architecture provided in the GitHub repository.

Hope this helps. Cheers!