Fabien Villareal:Process Rank will organize the world’s industrial intelligence.
Process Rank will organize the world’s industrial intelligence.
How Dynamic Ontologies Will Transform Industrial Artificial Intelligence
An interview between Pascal Bourreau, of SEO NEO, and Fabien Villareal, CISO at ZENITH
Fabien Vill
Villareal : What truly revolutionized the Internet wasn’t Google itself. It was Google’s ability to solve one of the most complex problems in computer science:
How can we automatically determine the most relevant piece of information among billions of documents ? PageRank was the first practical answer to that challenge. Today, industry faces exactly the same problem—but on an entirely different scale. Modern enterprises generate billions of data points from PLCs, SCADA systems, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), industrial historians, operating procedures, quality documentation, lessons learned, and even conversations between engineers. The challenge is no longer the volume of data. The challenge is contextual relevance. And this is precisely where the principles of SEO can fundamentally reshape industrial intelligence.
Pascal Bourreau : You frequently refer to the concept of a dynamic ontology. Why is it so important?
Fabien Villareal : Because artificial intelligence doesn’t truly understand a factory. It calculates. It detects statistical correlations. But it has no intrinsic understanding of what an industrial process actually is. An ontology changes everything. In computer science, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge within a specific domain. W3C standards such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language) already provide mechanisms for describing entities, their attributes, and the relationships between them. Knowledge Graphs—popularized at scale by Google—connect these concepts into a structured semantic representation. Now imagine that ontology no longer being static. Imagine it evolving continuously. Every production change. Every updated operating procedure. Every maintenance intervention. Every cybersecurity incident. Every energy optimization. Every operational lesson learned. Each event would automatically reshape the digital representation of the enterprise. We would no longer be talking about a static Digital Twin. We would be building a living digital brain.
Pascal Bourreau : Today, everyone is talking about Large Language Models. Why do you believe Knowledge Graphs will ultimately become even more important?
Fabien Villareal : Because an LLM knows an extraordinary amoun…but it doesn’t know your factory. Large Language Models excel at reasoning over language. What they naturally lack is industrial context. That’s exactly why Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures have emerged. RAG allows an LLM to retrieve information from enterprise documentation before generating an answer. But I believe the next evolution will be Knowledge Graph-Augmented Reasoning. Instead of querying documents alone, AI systems will directly reason over the living semantic representation of the enterprise. Knowledge Graphs will become the nervous system of industrial artificial intelligence.
Pascal Bourreau : Where does SEO fit into this vision?
Fabien Villareal : SEO is fundamentally the science of ranking. Google doesn’t simply search. It prioritizes. It evaluates trust. Authority. Freshness. Consistency. Popularity. Link quality. Why shouldn’t the same principles apply inside an industrial enterprise? A maintenance procedure successfully executed a thousand times should naturally carry more authority than one that has never been applied. A recommendation validated across multiple industrial sites should rank higher than an untested assumption. An engineering practice consistently endorsed by experienced teams should gradually acquire genuine digital authority. In other words, every piece of operational knowledge should have its own confidence score.
Pascal Bourreau :You call this concept ProcessRank.
Fabien Villareal : Exactly. ProcessRank could become for industrial operations what PageRank became for the Internet. It would no longer rank web pages. It would rank decisions. Tomorrow’s AI could simultaneously analyze. Millions of industrial variables, process dependencies, maintenance history, regulatory constraints, energy performance indicators, OT cybersecurity vulnerabilities, available workforce competencies, business objectives. Then answer a single question:
What is the best possible decision right now? This is no longer conversational AI. It is Decision Intelligence.
Pascal Bourreau : Is Deep Learning alone sufficient to achieve this vision?
Fabien Villareal : Not by itself. Deep Learning is exceptionally good at identifying complex patterns. However, it often lacks explainability. This is where Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) become game changers. Unlike conventional neural networks, GNNs learn directly from relationships. They understand networks. Dependencies. Influence. Causality. By combining Graph Neural Networks with dynamic ontologies and intelligent ranking mechanisms, AI becomes capable not only of detecting anomalies but also of explaining why they occur and identifying which corrective actions have the highest probability of success.
Pascal Bourreau : What will be the first real-world applications?
Fabien Villareal : Much sooner than most people expect. First, maintenance will become fully prescriptive. Instead of saying: “This bearing is likely to fail.” AI will say : “Among 147 possible maintenance actions, this is the one that simultaneously maximizes equipment availability, operational safety, maintenance cost, energy efficiency, and product quality.” The second breakthrough will occur in industrial cybersecurity. Cyberattacks will no longer be treated solely as network anomalies. They will be interpreted within their operational context. AI will understand the potential physical consequences on the production process itself. The third revolution concerns organizational knowledge. Every engineer solving a complex problem will automatically enrich the company’s collective intelligence. No more forgotten reports buried inside file servers. Knowledge will continuously evolve. Finally, executives will gain a truly systemic view of enterprise performance. Quality, energy, maintenance, supply Chain, cybersecurity, carbon emissions. Everything will become interconnected, Everything will be ranked. Everything will be explainable.
Pascal Bourreau : If you had to summarize your vision in a single sentence, what would it be?
Fabien Villareal We have spent the last twenty years teaching machines how to rank information. We will spend the next twenty years teaching them how to rank decisions. When dynamic ontologies, Knowledge Graphs, Deep Learning, Graph Neural Networks, and intelligent ranking engines converge, enterprises will finally possess AI capable not only of understanding their operations but also of continuously optimizing decision-making. Ten years from now, I believe we will look back at today’s Generative AI the same way we now look back at search engines in 1998: a foundational breakthrough—but still incapable of truly understanding complex systems. The next technological leap will not come from larger models. It will come from their ability to reason over a living representation of the enterprise.
Suggestion éditoriale : pour une publication LinkedIn Premium, Medium ou IEEE, je pousserais encore plus loin le concept en ajoutant un schéma intitulé “From Data to Decisions”, montrant le flux suivant :
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-big-bang-pharmaceutical-laboratories-fabien-villareal/
https://padlet.com/zamansoo365owfro/my-delightful-padlet-3yv7xkves62ucndz/wish/2998024942
https://padlet.com/zamansoo365owfro/my-delightful-padlet-3yv7xkves62ucndz/wish/2998024942
https://6647b466332d6.site123.me/
https://www.insa-lyon.fr/fr/evenement/presentation-framework-aveva
https://serov-stal.ru/user/nathopwyqb
https://fabien-villareal.blogspot.com/
https://fr.linkedin.com/in/villareal-wonderware
https://fabien-villareal.blogspot.com/?view=magazine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyEDXIaUi0Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifv3m9a6U94
https://eduardozrqg880.bravesites.com/entries/general/L-%C3%A9volution-de-l-industrie-4-0-en-France-l-impact-des-logiciels-Aveva-sur-les-op%C3%A9rations-industrielles-de-Fabien-VILLAREAL
Σχόλια
Δημοσίευση σχολίου