Overview: The Core Ontology of Petroleum Installations (COPI) is a domain-core ontology for representing petroleum production plants and their physical and informational organization. COPI provides a shared semantic foundation for integrating heterogeneous industrial data by specializing BFO 2020 and IOF-Core for the petroleum production domain.
Its scope includes physical assets and equipment, functional locations used to organize those assets, and information artifacts describing plant elements and documentation. COPI is intended to support semantic integration across industrial data sources, querying of asset and functional-location hierarchies, comparison and alignment of industrial standards, and the development of more specialized application ontologies.
A central objective of COPI is to move beyond the largely taxonomic representations found in standards such as ISO 15926-4, CFIHOS, and DEXP. IRather than representing equipment classes only through labels, textual definitions, and subclass hierarchies, COPI enriches them with formal axioms grounded in their designed functions and participation in physical processes.
Equipment universals are characterized through an identity-giving function, representing the designed purpose that distinguishes the type of equipment, and a process participation signature, describing the characteristic pattern of inputs, outputs, and transformations involved in realizing that function. These elements provide the basis for defining equipment types, establishing their differences from related classes, and identifying principled disjointness conditions based on physical incompatibility rather than arbitrary taxonomic decisions.
The ontology development process also captures the most specific genus of each equipment type, its distinguishing differentia, necessary component parts, and relevant process participation constraints. Axiomatization is supported by COPIeditor, an LLM-assisted ontology engineering environment, while all proposed representations undergo expert review before inclusion in released versions of the ontology.
Through this approach, COPI provides a formally grounded semantic layer capable of connecting reference standards, engineering information, and operational datasets while serving as a reusable foundation for ontology-based applications in the petroleum industry.

Papers submitted to FOIS 2026:

Nicolau Oyhenard dos Santos, Cauã Antunes, Mara Abel, João Netto. Axiomatizing Industrial Reference Data: A BFO/IOF-Core Enrichment of ISO 15926-4 Equipment Classes. To appear in Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2026), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press. (Accepted; camera-ready submitted — a DOI/link will be added once the proceedings are published.)

Nicolau Oyhenard dos Santos, Haroldo Rojas, Cauã Roca Antunes, Fabrício H. Rodrigues, Régis Romeu, Rafael H. Petry, Mara Abel, João César Netto. An Ontology Design Pattern for Functional Locations in Industrial Asset Management. To appear in Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2026), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press. (Accepted; to be presented 21–25 September 2026 in Vitória, ES, Brazil — a DOI/link will be added once the proceedings are published.)

Ontology available at: https://github.com/INF-UFRGS-Ontologies/COPI