The mission of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry is to create a set of core and open reference ontologies that spans the entire domain of digital manufacturing. The IOF works with government, industry, academic, and standards organizations to advance data interoperability in their respective fields.

To learn more about our past, please read about the history of the IOF.

Technical goals

  • Creating a suite of open and principles-based reference ontologies, from which other domain dependent or application ontologies can be derived in a modular fashion, remaining ‘generic’ (i.e., non-proprietary, non-implementation specific) so they can be reused in any number of industrial domains or manufacturing specializations.
  • Providing principles and best practices by which quality ontologies can be developed that will support interoperability for industrial domains,
  • Instituting a governance mechanism to maintain and promulgate the goals and principles,
  • Providing an organizational framework and governance processes that ensure conformance to principles and best practices for development, sharing, maintenance, evolution, and documentation of IOF ontologies.

Who is involved?

IOF membership is open to all. Please go to the participation tab on this web site for more details. Currently the IOF has participants from the following organizations; however, there is no official membership or endorsement to IOF from these organizations.


IOF Resources