Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the main ontologies related to eMaintenance solutions and to study their application area. The advantages of using these ontologies to improve and control data quality will be investigated.

Design/methodology/approach – A literature study has been done to explore the eMaintenance ontologies in the different areas. These ontologies are mainly related to content structure and communication interface. Then, ontologies will be linked to each step of the data production process in maintenance.

Findings – The findings suggest that eMaintenance ontologies can help to produce a high quality data in maintenance. The suggested maintenance data production process may help to control data quality. Using these ontologies in every step of the process may help to provide management tools to provide high quality data.

Research limitations/implications – Based on this study, it can be concluded that further research could broaden the investigation to identify more eMaintenance ontologies. Moreover, studying these ontologies in more technical details may help to increase the understandability and the use of these standards.

Practical implications – It has been concluded in this study that applying eMaintenance ontologies by companies needs additional cost and time. Also the lack or the ineffective use of eMaintenance tools in many enterprises is one of the limitations for using these ontologies.

Originality/value – Investigating eMaintenance ontologies and connecting them to maintenance data production is important to control and manage the data quality in maintenance.