MQTO: A Connector Ontology for Cross-Domain Manufacturing Quality Troubleshooting

Manufacturing quality troubleshooting in discrete production requires integrating knowledge and evidence from quality management, process data, and production context, which are typically isolated in separate information silos. This fragmentation makes root-cause analysis time-consuming, expert-dependent, and difficult to trace. We introduce MQTO, the Manufacturing Quality Troubleshooting Ontology, a connector ontology that semantically links these silos through a bridging metric concept. Derived from an industrial use case and developed using the Linked Open Terms methodology, MQTO aligns with established vocabularies for procedural knowledge, sensor data, and production context. Evaluation results, covering syntactic and logical validation, FAIRness assessment (FOOPS! score: 91%), and competency-question coverage, confirm the ontology’s correctness and applicability. An application of MQTO in die-casting shows how troubleshooting procedures, data sources, and production context can be instantiated and queried in a realistic industrial scenario. MQTO is publicly available at https://w3id.org/mqto.