ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020

Information technology — Office equipment — Guidelines for the development of an ontology (vocabulary, components and relationships) for office equipment

This document provides background information and guidelines for the development of an ontology for office equipment. An example of how such a standard can be used to automate the identification of resources for colour is provided. NOTE Often the terms vocabulary and ontology are used with the same meaning.

Technologies de l'information — Équipement de bureau — Lignes directrices pour l'élaboration d'une ontologie (vocabulaire, composantes et relations) pour l'équipement de bureau

General Information

• Status: Published
• Publication Date: 11-Jun-2020
• ICS: 35.260 - Office machines
• Technical Committee: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 28 - Office equipment
• Drafting Committee: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 28/WG 5 - Office Colour
• Current Stage: 6060 - International Standard published
• Start Date: 12-Jun-2020
• Due Date: 21-Jun-2020
• Completion Date: 12-Jun-2020

Standards Content (Sample)

TECHNICAL ISO/IEC TR
REPORT 22981
First edition
2020-06
Information technology — Office
equipment — Guidelines for
the development of an ontology
(vocabulary, components and
relationships) for office equipment
Technologies de l'information — Équipement de bureau — Lignes
directrices pour l'élaboration d'une ontologie (vocabulaire,
composantes et relations) pour l'équipement de bureau
Reference number
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)
©
ISO/IEC 2020

---------------------- Page: 1 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

COPYRIGHT PROTECTED DOCUMENT
© ISO/IEC 2020
All rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified, or required in the context of its implementation, no part of this publication may
be reproduced or utilized otherwise in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or posting
on the internet or an intranet, without prior written permission. Permission can be requested from either ISO at the address
below or ISO’s member body in the country of the requester.
ISO copyright office
CP 401 • Ch. de Blandonnet 8
CH-1214 Vernier, Geneva
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Website: www.iso.org
Published in Switzerland
ii © ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved

---------------------- Page: 2 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

Contents Page
Foreword .iv
Introduction .v
1 Scope . 1
2 Normative references . 1
3 Terms and definitions . 1
4 Key concepts and current activities . 1
4.1 General . 1
4.2 Virtualisation of physical objects and processes . 2
4.3 Big data and artificial intelligence . 2
4.4 Peer-to-peer communication and smart contracts . 2
4.5 Identification and authorisation . 3
4.6 Ontology development . 3
5 Steps in the development of an [office] ontology . 4
5.1 Selection of appropriate tools . 4
5.2 Identification of elements . 4
5.3 Relationship to existing ontologies . 4
5.4 Other vocabularies and standards development organisations . 5
5.5 Example of automated communication . 6
5.6 Vocabulary specification . 7
Annex A (informative) Basic RDF concept . 8
Bibliography .10
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved iii

---------------------- Page: 3 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

Foreword
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (the International Electrotechnical
Commission) form the specialized system for worldwide standardization. National bodies that
are members of ISO or IEC participate in the development of International Standards through
technical committees established by the respective organization to deal with particular fields of
technical activity. ISO and IEC technical committees collaborate in fields of mutual interest. Other
international organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO and IEC, also
take part in the work.
The procedures used to develop this document and those intended for its further maintenance are
described in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1. In particular, the different approval criteria needed for
the different types of document should be noted. This document was drafted in accordance with the
editorial rules of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 (see www .iso .org/ directives).
Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject
of patent rights. ISO and IEC shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent
rights. Details of any patent rights identified during the development of the document will be in the
Introduction and/or on the ISO list of patent declarations received (see www .iso .org/ patents) or the IEC
list of patent declarations received (see http:// patents .iec .ch).
Any trade name used in this document is information given for the convenience of users and does not
constitute an endorsement.
For an explanation of the voluntary nature of standards, the meaning of ISO specific terms and
expressions related to conformity assessment, as well as information about ISO's adherence to the
World Trade Organization (WTO) principles in the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), see www .iso .org/
iso/ foreword .html.
This document was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology,
Subcommittee SC 28, Office equipment.
Any feedback or questions on this document should be directed to the user’s national standards body. A
complete listing of these bodies can be found at www .iso .org/ members .html.
iv © ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved

---------------------- Page: 4 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

Introduction
The aim of this document is to provide an overview of the current status of ‘office equipment’, to identify
likely future directions and to show how standardisation of terminology in the form of an ontology
could provide a strong framework for office automation.
Historically ‘office equipment’ was more clearly defined than it is today. The concept of what
constitutes ‘the office’ is changing and people no longer have to go to a particular place to perform
tasks traditionally associated with the office. These tasks include activities such as creating or copying
documents, reading reference books and preparing presentation materials can now be carried out in
many different environments as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 — Ideas of what constitutes an office are changing rapidly
The set of tools and equipment traditionally available to office users has also expanded and now includes
on-line document creation and sharing, high quality colour displays, digital projection equipment, video
communication and so on. Indeed there seems to be a new class of equipment, used to enable tasks
traditionally associated with ‘the office’, introduced each year.
Consequently, there is no longer a clear boundary between office, personal, industrial and commercial
documents as many of the same design tools and reproduction equipment are used across all of these
sectors. For example, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word are used to create
company brochures, personal documents and product handbooks.
With the advent of high-speed internet, there is no longer a need for ‘office workers’ to be in the same
location and, in many cases, companies operate a virtual office with members working from many
different locations. To support this, documents are made available in a central repository, for example
using a document management system, and can be viewed, modified and printed at any location as long
as the user has the required rights.
When considering requirements for future office standards it is important to consider these recent
developments and also to think about what users will expect to be able to do in future. Given the fact
that the same range of systems and supporting software are used for several different purposes, the
scope of these standards should also be considered. One option would be to focus on the set of tools
used to communicate business ideas, particularly the creation, display, printing, copying, distribution
and archival of documents.
[4]
In a Scientific American article in May 2001 , Tim Berners-Lee proposed a concept that he referred
to as ‘the Semantic Web’. He envisaged the development of the internet in such a way that information
could be identified by structured metadata, for example its type, creator, intended use and so on.
In this article the authors observe that three of the important technologies are already in place:
[26] [5]
eXtensible Markup Language (XML) , the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Uniform
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved v

---------------------- Page: 5 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

[27]
Resource Indicators (URIs) . In its simplest form, XML allows the creation of tags such as
and and associated values such as and and these data names and
values can be used to annotate web pages. While in some cases these can be understood by a person
reading these pages, the meaning cannot generally be understood by a machine. The meaning, however,
can be expressed using RDF which provides a mechanism to allow properties of particular things to
be described in a way whereby they can be parsed unambiguously by machines. For example
, has a structure rather like the subject, verb and object of an elementary
sentence. The subject and object can be defined precisely using URIs and with care URIs can also be
used to define the relationship (the verb) between the subject and object. The authors observed that
this model can be used to allow web data to be interpreted by machines. This is a very powerful concept
and with only minor modifications is one of the basic principles for the Internet (or web) of Things (IoT).
The basic concept of the IoT is that all internet objects have a unique identifier such as an IP address,
URL, URI, barcode or RFID tag. ‘Things’ include any kind of uniquely identifiable object including both
physical and abstract objects such as a device, web page, communications link or an item with an RFID
tag or barcode. Where suitable infrastructure and authentication exists, devices can communicate
directly with other devices, for example a home security system can detect an intruder and pass this
information to a mobile telephone to alert the home owner (device-to-device). Similarly, devices can
obtain data from web pages, for example a mobile phone can find the weather forecast in Tokyo or a list
of books published by Springer on colour management. Thinking about the needs for accurate colour
reproduction, a digital printer can find a suitable ICC profile for its current configuration (paper, ink
set, resolution etc.). This document uses identification of a suitable ICC profile as a practical example.
Ensuring that equipment used in the office of the future can communicate effectively with minimal
user intervention is one of the goals of manufacturers of all such equipment. An important prerequisite
to this kind of communication is the ability to be able to identify internet resources clearly using some
[10]
form of standardised vocabulary or ontology .
One of the mechanisms proposed for the development of ontologies is RDF, the latest version of which
[5]
was published by W3C on 25th February 2014 . Details of RDF and the way in which it is supported is
complex and Annex A provides an overview of the principles. Further research is needed, particularly
to investigate details of registration of standard predicates.
One benefit of RDF-enabled documents is that search engines can provide more useful search results as
they can discover web resources of particular types and order these in a way that is useful to someone
who wishes to browse the set.
In addition to the basic RDF syntax there is a need to standardise the types of things and the
[27]
relationships between them. The W3C recommends the use of Web Ontology Language (OWL) which
provides the framework to define basic classes, properties, individuals, and data values which can
be used in conjunction with RDF for a given domain. More recently (July 2017) W3C introduced the
Shapes Constraints Language (SHACL) which provides constraints necessary for data validation. OWL
is designed for classification tasks (inferencing in an ‘open world’), while SHACL covers data validation
(in a ‘closed world’) in a similar way to that of traditional schema languages.
Perhaps it is easiest to understand how an ontology can be defined by looking at an example. Here, the
[17]
ontology of BBC programmes has been selected and a very high-level overview of this is shown in
Figure 2.
The first observation is that this ontology is built on a number of others:
[18]
— The Music Ontology provides main concepts and properties for describing music (i.e. artists,
albums and tracks) in terms of, for example a 'Composition','MusicArtist', 'AudioFile' and so on. This
ontology was developed independently and is widely used by other ontologies.
[19]
— FOAF (an acronym of Friend Of A Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing people, their
activities and their relations to other people and objects.
— SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) is used to define some of the more abstract concepts
such as topics of a program.
vi © ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved

---------------------- Page: 6 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

— Event ontology describes where and when the event was held and who the participants were.
These ontologies in turn build on other ontologies. The BBC ontology is part of a large web of connected
[15]
ontologies which can be explored from the Linked Open Vocabularies website . The BBC Programmes
ontology defines specific classes such as ‘Broadcast’, ‘FM’, ‘Format’, ‘Genre’ and so on.
Figure 2 — An example of an ontology
In a similar way, it would be possible to build an ontology for office equipment, office documents, internet
resources and so on. In order to provide a concrete example, the task of automatically identifying ICC
profiles has been selected. This example addresses only one aspect of office devices (that of achieving
colour fidelity) but is sufficiently complex to show how standardised metadata can be used in practice.
For all of these solutions to be useful, some kind of domain-specific ontology is needed. An example of
the identification of ICC profiles is used in this document but this should be seen as part of a broader
ontology, for example an imaging and print ontology or an office actors, tools and resources ontology.
There are aspects of ICC profile metadata that are common to other areas, for example identification
of colour imaging devices, print substrates, printing inks and other more abstract metadata such as
identification of the copyright holder, creator and owner. This is an important consideration and where
such metadata is already well defined, this should be incorporated by reference and not redefined by
any new ontology. There are a number of groups closely related to that of office equipment and any
work done should be coordinated with these other groups.
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved vii

---------------------- Page: 7 ----------------------
TECHNICAL REPORT ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)
Information technology — Office equipment — Guidelines
for the development of an ontology (vocabulary,
components and relationships) for office equipment
1 Scope
This document provides background information and guidelines for the development of an ontology for
office equipment.
An example of how such a standard can be used to automate the identification of resources for colour is
provided.
NOTE Often the terms vocabulary and ontology are used with the same meaning.
2 Normative references
There are no normative references in this document.
3 Terms and definitions
For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply.
ISO and IEC maintain terminological databases for use in standardization at the following addresses:
— ISO Online browsing platform: available at https:// www .iso .org/ obp
— IEC Electropedia: available at http:// www .electropedia .org/
3.1
office actor
person or machine conducting a specific role related to an office function
3.2
ontology
specification of concrete or abstract things, and the relationships among them, in a prescribed domain
of knowledge
[SOURCE: ISO/IEC TR 19763-9:2015,3.1.3 modified — Note 1 to entry has been deleted.]
4 Key concepts and current activities
4.1 General
There are several important concepts that are emerging and seem likely to become important for future
business technologies. Together these enable direct peer-to-peer communication and form the basis of
emerging concepts such as smart cities, smart homes, smart cars, smart office and many others. These
future models assume that many devices will be used, and these devices will communicate with each
other directly rather than requiring a central control as is currently required. Such a central control
becomes impractical when the number of devices increases to the extent envisaged.
Key concepts include virtualisation of physical objects and processes, big data, artificial intelligence,
peer-to-peer communication, digital rights management, identification and authentication. The main
topic of this document is the role played by an ontology but some context for this may be helpful.
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved 1

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ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

4.2 Virtualisation of physical objects and processes
Virtualisation is not a new idea. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the representation of a printer
by an icon on our computer’s virtual desktop. We can control the behaviour of the printer by changing
settings using a print dialog box and request that a virtual document created by interacting with our
computer keyboard and other controls should be printed. This results in the creation of a physical copy
of something that up to that point only existed as a virtual entity. Over recent years, this basic model
has been expanded to provide virtual information about physical aspects of the printer such as the
amount of ink remaining, the size and sometimes the type of media present and various other controls
that adjust physical aspects of the printer in order to achieve the desired print appearance.
This basic concept of virtualisation has been expanded by the Industry 4.0 initiative originated by
[20]
the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (popularised by Siemens and Bosch). In
Industry 4.0, many aspects of industrial machines and processes have a virtual representation, and
this enables intelligent machines to communicate directly with one another. For example, a robot
creating a product as part of an assembly line can indicate that it is ready to begin a new assembly,
this indication can be recognised by another device (an inventory controller) which can request further
robotic systems to deliver the set of parts needed. Similarly, the inventory controller can detect when
the supply of parts is low and automatically order new parts to be delivered.
The flow of processes on a production line can be monitored and optimised or modified based on
changes in demand for the product being manufactured. In this way manufacturing operations can be
fully automated, requiring intervention only when something goes wrong.
One key component of this virtualisation is the increased availability of smart sensors. Almost every
aspect of an environment can be monitored such as energy usage, temperature and room lighting.
Smart actuators are also becoming available enabling remote control of temperature, lighting and other
devices. In this way, sensors and actuators are used in industry to allow operators to interact with a
virtual model of ph
...

TECHNICAL ISO/IEC TR
REPORT 22981
First edition
Information technology — Office
equipment — Guidelines for
the development of an ontology
(vocabulary, components and
relationships) for office equipment
PROOF/ÉPREUVE
Reference number
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)
©
ISO/IEC 2020

---------------------- Page: 1 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

COPYRIGHT PROTECTED DOCUMENT
© ISO/IEC 2020
All rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified, or required in the context of its implementation, no part of this publication may
be reproduced or utilized otherwise in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or posting
on the internet or an intranet, without prior written permission. Permission can be requested from either ISO at the address
below or ISO’s member body in the country of the requester.
ISO copyright office
CP 401 • Ch. de Blandonnet 8
CH-1214 Vernier, Geneva
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Website: www.iso.org
Published in Switzerland
ii PROOF/ÉPREUVE © ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved

---------------------- Page: 2 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

Contents Page
Foreword .iv
Introduction .v
1 Scope . 1
2 Normative references . 1
3 Terms and definitions . 1
4 Key concepts and current activities . 1
4.1 General . 1
4.2 Virtualisation of physical objects and processes . 2
4.3 Big data and artificial intelligence . 2
4.4 Peer-to-peer communication and smart contracts . 2
4.5 Identification and authorisation . 3
4.6 Ontology development . 3
5 Steps in the development of an [office] ontology . 4
5.1 Selection of appropriate tools . 4
5.2 Identification of elements . 4
5.3 Relationship to existing ontologies . 4
5.4 Other vocabularies and standards development organisations . 5
5.5 Example of automated communication . 6
5.6 Vocabulary specification . 7
Annex A (informative) Basic RDF concept . 8
Bibliography .10
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved PROOF/ÉPREUVE iii

---------------------- Page: 3 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

Foreword
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (the International Electrotechnical
Commission) form the specialized system for worldwide standardization. National bodies that
are members of ISO or IEC participate in the development of International Standards through
technical committees established by the respective organization to deal with particular fields of
technical activity. ISO and IEC technical committees collaborate in fields of mutual interest. Other
international organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO and IEC, also
take part in the work.
The procedures used to develop this document and those intended for its further maintenance are
described in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1. In particular, the different approval criteria needed for
the different types of document should be noted. This document was drafted in accordance with the
editorial rules of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 (see www .iso .org/ directives).
Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject
of patent rights. ISO and IEC shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent
rights. Details of any patent rights identified during the development of the document will be in the
Introduction and/or on the ISO list of patent declarations received (see www .iso .org/ patents) or the IEC
list of patent declarations received (see http:// patents .iec .ch).
Any trade name used in this document is information given for the convenience of users and does not
constitute an endorsement.
For an explanation of the voluntary nature of standards, the meaning of ISO specific terms and
expressions related to conformity assessment, as well as information about ISO's adherence to the
World Trade Organization (WTO) principles in the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), see www .iso .org/
iso/ foreword .html.
This document was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology,
Subcommittee SC 28, Office equipment.
Any feedback or questions on this document should be directed to the user’s national standards body. A
complete listing of these bodies can be found at www .iso .org/ members .html.
iv PROOF/ÉPREUVE © ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved

---------------------- Page: 4 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

Introduction
The aim of this document is to provide an overview of the current status of ‘office equipment’, to identify
likely future directions and to show how standardisation of terminology in the form of an ontology
could provide a strong framework for office automation.
Historically ‘office equipment’ was more clearly defined than it is today. The concept of what
constitutes ‘the office’ is changing and people no longer have to go to a particular place to perform
tasks traditionally associated with the office. These tasks include activities such as creating or copying
documents, reading reference books and preparing presentation materials can now be carried out in
many different environments as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 — Ideas of what constitutes an office are changing rapidly
The set of tools and equipment traditionally available to office users has also expanded and now includes
on-line document creation and sharing, high quality colour displays, digital projection equipment, video
communication and so on. Indeed there seems to be a new class of equipment, used to enable tasks
traditionally associated with ‘the office’, introduced each year.
Consequently, there is no longer a clear boundary between office, personal, industrial and commercial
documents as many of the same design tools and reproduction equipment are used across all of these
sectors. For example, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word are used to create
company brochures, personal documents and product handbooks.
With the advent of high-speed internet, there is no longer a need for ‘office workers’ to be in the same
location and, in many cases, companies operate a virtual office with members working from many
different locations. To support this, documents are made available in a central repository, for example
using a document management system, and can be viewed, modified and printed at any location as long
as the user has the required rights.
When considering requirements for future office standards it is important to consider these recent
developments and also to think about what users will expect to be able to do in future. Given the fact
that the same range of systems and supporting software are used for several different purposes, the
scope of these standards should also be considered. One option would be to focus on the set of tools
used to communicate business ideas, particularly the creation, display, printing, copying, distribution
and archival of documents.
[4]
In a Scientific American article in May 2001 , Tim Berners-Lee proposed a concept that he referred to
as ‘the semantic web’. He envisaged the development of the internet in such a way that information could
be identified by structured metadata, for example its type, creator, intended use and so on. In this article
the authors observe that three of the important technologies are already in place: eXtensible Markup
[26] [5]
Language (XML) , the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Uniform Resource Indicators
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved PROOF/ÉPREUVE v

---------------------- Page: 5 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

[27]
(URIs) . In its simplest form, XML allows the creation of tags such as and and
associated values such as and and these data names and values can be used to
annotate web pages. While in some cases these can be understood by a person reading these pages,
the meaning cannot generally be understood by a machine. The meaning, however, can be expressed
using RDF which provides a mechanism to allow properties of particular things to be described in
a way whereby they can be parsed unambiguously by machines. For example of> , has a structure rather like the subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence. The
subject and object can be defined precisely using URIs and with care URIs can also be used to define
the relationship (the verb) between the subject and object. The authors observed that this model can be
used to allow web data to be interpreted by machines. This is a very powerful concept and with only
minor modifications is one of the basic principles for the Internet (or web) of Things (IoT).
The basic concept of the IoT is that all internet objects have a unique identifier such as an IP address,
URL, URI, barcode or RFID tag. ‘Things’ include any kind of uniquely identifiable object including both
physical and abstract objects such as a device, web page, communications link or an item with an RFID
tag or barcode. Where suitable infrastructure and authentication exists, devices can communicate
directly with other devices, for example a home security system can detect an intruder and pass this
information to a mobile telephone to alert the home owner (device-to-device). Similarly, devices can
obtain data from web pages, for example a mobile phone can find the weather forecast in Tokyo or a list
of books published by Springer on colour management. Thinking about the needs for accurate colour
reproduction, a digital printer can find a suitable ICC profile for its current configuration (paper, ink
set, resolution etc.). This document uses identification of a suitable ICC profile as a practical example.
Ensuring that equipment used in the office of the future can communicate effectively with minimal
user intervention is one of the goals of manufacturers of all such equipment. An important prerequisite
to this kind of communication is the ability to be able to identify internet resources clearly using some
[10]
form of standardised vocabulary or ontology .
One of the mechanisms proposed for the development of ontologies is RDF, the latest version of which
[5]
was published by W3C on 25th February 2014 . Details of RDF and the way in which it is supported is
complex and Annex A provides an overview of the principles. Further research is needed, particularly
to investigate details of registration of standard predicates.
One benefit of RDF-enabled documents is that search engines can provide more useful search results as
they can discover web resources of particular types and order these in a way that is useful to someone
who wishes to browse the set.
In addition to the basic RDF syntax there is a need to standardise the types of things and the
[27]
relationships between them. The W3C recommends the use of Web Ontology Language (OWL) which
provides the framework to define basic classes, properties, individuals, and data values which can
be used in conjunction with RDF for a given domain. More recently (July 2017) W3C introduced the
Shapes Constraints Language (SHACL) which provides constraints necessary for data validation. OWL
is designed for classification tasks (inferencing in an ‘open world’), while SHACL covers data validation
(in a ‘closed world’) in a similar way to that of traditional schema languages.
Perhaps it is easiest to understand how an ontology can be defined by looking at an example. Here, the
[17]
ontology of BBC programmes has been selected and a very high-level overview of this is shown in
Figure 2.
The first observation is that this ontology is built on a number of others:
[18]
— The music ontology provides main concepts and properties for describing music (i.e. artists,
albums and tracks) in terms of, for example a 'Composition','MusicArtist', 'AudioFile' and so on. This
ontology was developed independently and is widely used by other ontologies.
[19]
— FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing people, their
activities and their relations to other people and objects.
— SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) is used to define some of the more abstract concepts
such as topics of a program.
vi PROOF/ÉPREUVE © ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved

---------------------- Page: 6 ----------------------
ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

— Event ontology describes where and when the event was held and who the participants were.
These ontologies in turn build on other ontologies. The BBC ontology is part of a large web of connected
[15]
ontologies which can be explored from the Linked Open Vocabularies website . The BBC programmes
ontology defines specific classes such as ‘broadcast’, ‘FM’, ‘format’, ‘genre’ and so on.
Figure 2 — An example of an ontology
In a similar way, it would be possible to build an ontology for office equipment, office documents, internet
resources and so on. In order to provide a concrete example, the task of automatically identifying ICC
profiles has been selected. This example addresses only one aspect of office devices (that of achieving
colour fidelity) but is sufficiently complex to show how standardised metadata can be used in practice.
For all of these solutions to be useful, some kind of domain-specific ontology is needed. An example of
the identification of ICC profiles is used in this document but this should be seen as part of a broader
ontology, for example an imaging and print ontology or an office actors, tools and resources ontology.
There are aspects of ICC profile metadata that are common to other areas, for example identification
of colour imaging devices, print substrates, printing inks and other more abstract metadata such as
identification of the copyright holder, creator and owner. This is an important consideration and where
such metadata is already well defined, this should be incorporated by reference and not redefined by
any new ontology. There are a number of groups closely related to that of office equipment and any
work done should be coordinated with these other groups.
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved PROOF/ÉPREUVE vii

---------------------- Page: 7 ----------------------
TECHNICAL REPORT ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)
Information technology — Office equipment — Guidelines
for the development of an ontology (vocabulary,
components and relationships) for office equipment
1 Scope
This document provides background information and guidelines for the development of an ontology for
office equipment.
An example of how such a standard can be used to automate the identification of resources for colour is
provided.
NOTE Often the terms vocabulary and ontology are used with the same meaning.
2 Normative references
There are no normative references in this document.
3 Terms and definitions
For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply.
ISO and IEC maintain terminological databases for use in standardization at the following addresses:
— ISO Online browsing platform: available at https:// www .iso .org/ obp
— IEC Electropedia: available at http:// www .electropedia .org/
3.1
office actor
person or machine conducting a specific role related to an office function
3.2
ontology
specification of concrete or abstract things, and the relationships among them, in a prescribed domain
of knowledge
[SOURCE: ISO/IEC TR 19763-9:2015,3.1.3 modified — Note 1 to entry has been deleted.]
4 Key concepts and current activities
4.1 General
There are several important concepts that are emerging and seem likely to become important for future
business technologies. Together these enable direct peer-to-peer communication and form the basis of
emerging concepts such as smart cities, smart homes, smart cars, smart office and many others. These
future models assume that many devices will be used, and these devices will communicate with each
other directly rather than requiring a central control as is currently required. Such a central control
becomes impractical when the number of devices increases to the extent envisaged.
Key concepts include virtualisation of physical objects and processes, big data, artificial intelligence,
peer-to-peer communication, digital rights management, identification and authentication. The main
topic of this document is the role played by an ontology but some context for this may be helpful.
© ISO/IEC 2020 – All rights reserved PROOF/ÉPREUVE 1

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ISO/IEC TR 22981:2020(E)

4.2 Virtualisation of physical objects and processes
Virtualisation is not a new idea. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the representation of a printer
by an icon on our computer’s virtual desktop. We can control the behaviour of the printer by changing
settings using a print dialog box and request that a virtual document created by interacting with our
computer keyboard and other controls should be printed. This results in the creation of a physical copy
of something that up to that point only existed as a virtual entity. Over recent years, this basic model
has been expanded to provide virtual information about physical aspects of the printer such as the
amount of ink remaining, the size and sometimes the type of media present and various other controls
that adjust physical aspects of the printer in order to achieve the desired print appearance.
This basic concept of virtualisation has been expanded by the Industry 4.0 initiative originated by
[20]
the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (popularised by Siemens and Bosch). In
Industry 4.0, many aspects of industrial machines and processes have a virtual representation, and
this enables intelligent machines to communicate directly with one another. For example, a robot
creating a product as part of an assembly line can indicate that it is ready to begin a new assembly,
this indication can be recognised by another device (an inventory controller) which can request further
robotic systems to deliver the set of parts needed. Similarly, the inventory controller can detect when
the supply of parts is low and automatically order new parts to be delivered.
The flow of processes on a production line can be monitored and optimised or modified based on
changes in demand for the product being manufactured. In this way manufacturing operations can be
fully automated, requiring intervention only when something goes wrong.
One key component of this virtualisation is the increased availability of smart sensors. Almost every
aspect of an environment can be monitored such as energy usage, temperature and room lighting.
Smart actuators are also becoming available enabling remote control of temperature, lighting and other
devices. In this way, sensors and actuators are used in industry to allow operators to interact with a
virtual model of physical production systems and indeed for production systems to interact with one
another with minimal nee
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