OAGi Launches IOF 202603 to Enhance Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Ontologies and Interoperability

OAGi Expands Industrial Ontologies Foundry with Major Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Release

ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES, October 23, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The Open Applications Group (OAGi) announces the release of Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) 202603, significantly expanding the Foundry’s support for biopharmaceutical manufacturing while continuing to strengthen its cross-industry ontology foundation.

The release extends IOF’s Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Ontologies, an open suite for describing the materials, equipment, processes, recipes, parameters, quality attributes, and other entities involved in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The suite was initially developed through the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL) and is now integrated into the broader IOF architecture.

IOF 202603 adds substantial new coverage across the biopharmaceutical manufacturing lifecycle. New modules address areas including deviation management, material testing, risk management, manufacturing process development and qualification, design of experiments, statistics, molecular entities, and targets, limits, and ranges. Existing modules for equipment, materials, manufacturing execution, monitoring and control, and process parameters have also been substantially expanded.

Together, these ontologies provide organizations with consistent, machine-readable definitions for information that today is often represented differently across laboratories, manufacturing sites, software systems, and companies. They are intended to make it easier to integrate data without losing what that data means, providing a common semantic foundation for applications such as process development, manufacturing execution, material traceability, quality management, analytics, and AI.

For example, the suite now provides common concepts for representing critical process parameters and critical quality attributes; manufacturing recipes and their execution; bioreactors, chromatography systems, filters, and other equipment; material testing and release; manufacturing deviations and corrective actions; and the identification, assessment, control, and review of manufacturing risks.

The biopharmaceutical ontologies use the IOF Core Ontology, allowing concepts specific to biopharmaceutical manufacturing to connect consistently with concepts used elsewhere in industrial data. IOF Core and its domain ontologies are grounded in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), providing a common architecture across the IOF suite.

The 202603 release also introduces a new provisional Sensor Ontology and includes updates to IOF Core, Supply Chain, Production Planning, Product-Service Systems, Maintenance, and other existing IOF ontologies.

“Biopharmaceutical manufacturers have to connect information about materials, equipment, processes, recipes, quality, and risk across many different systems and stages of the manufacturing lifecycle”, remarks Kelvin H. Lee, Director of the Manufacturing USA National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL). “This release gives the industry a shared semantic foundation for making those connections explicit and reusable across organizations and technologies.”

“The goal of the IOF”, according to OAGi CEO Jim Wilson, “is not simply to standardize terminology. It is to provide a common understanding of what industrial data is about. Bringing biopharmaceutical manufacturing knowledge into the IOF framework demonstrates how a common ontological foundation can support interoperability both within an industry and across industrial domains.”

As prominent ontologist, Barry Smith points out, “AI is generating an increased need for ontologies to provide the consistent semantics which AI needs to run its software safely and usefully. As so often happens, however, a new demand for ontologies yields an onslaught of home-baked ontologies of, at best, only local value. It thereby recreates the very silo problem that ontology was designed to solve. The IOF is making a valuable contribution to circumventing this silo problem in the industrial domain.”

The IOF 202603 release includes both Released content, which IOF considers stable, and Provisional content that remains under active development and is published for evaluation and community contribution. All released and provisional ontologies in the suite have been checked for logical consistency and satisfiability using the HermiT reasoner.

IOF 202603 is available now through the IOF specification portal:
IOF Release 202603

OAGi and the Industrial Ontologies Foundry invite manufacturers, technology providers, researchers, and other industrial organizations to use the ontologies, provide feedback, and participate in their continuing development.

About the Industrial Ontologies Foundry

The Industrial Ontologies Foundry is an OAGi initiative developing a suite of open, interoperable ontologies for digital manufacturing. IOF ontologies provide formally defined concepts that can be shared across systems and organizations, helping reduce the semantic ambiguity that makes industrial data integration difficult. IOF ontologies are implemented in OWL, grounded in Basic Formal Ontology, and distributed under an open license. This work is made possible in part by NIIMBL and award 70NANB17H002 from the U.S Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Michelle Banks
Open Applications Group , Inc
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