Nuclear plants face a critical knowledge management challenge as experienced staff retire and the industry targets a 4x capacity expansion. Ontologies offer a solution by making plant relationships, constraints, and configuration logic explicit, queryable, and auditable. Using open standards like RDF, OWL, and SHACL, an ontology encodes component identities, safety constraints, licensing commitments, and their interconnections as structured triples. This replaces manual, multi-system lookups with a single queryable structure that persists across decisions. Practical benefits include faster configuration control workflows, automated constraint validation, inspection-ready compliance packages, and a foundation for digital twins and AI-assisted operations. Databricks and Delta Lake are presented as the governance platform, with open formats ensuring portability across regulators, vendors, and operators.
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The cost of implicit knowledgeAn ontology that closes the gapWorking within nuclear's regulatory boundariesSort: