With digital transformation, industrial companies today are facing the challenges to change and innovate their business, by leveraging digital technologies and tools to support their processes and their operations. One of their main challenges is the management of the company knowledge, especially when tacit and owned by industry workers. In this paper, we illustrate how knowledge graphs can be the turning point to allow industry workers digitize and exploit the knowledge about the “what”, the “how” and the “why” of their everyday activities.In particular, we focus on the “how” by illustrating the challenges related to procedural knowledge management, i.e., the knowledge about processes and workflows that employees need to follow, and comply with, to correctly execute their tasks, in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness, to reduce risks and human errors and to optimize operations. We also explain the relationship in this context between knowledge graphs and sub-symbolic AI approaches.

The ability to extract valuable information from documents and convert it into knowledge is crucial for driving technological innovation across industries. While adding metadata to manuals enhances their searchability, the real knowledge is still hidden in the procedural information they contain, which offers vital guidance for operators. Therefore, the approach of extracting and transforming unstructured human-readable information into machine-interpretable data is fundamental for establishing cutting-edge digital knowledge-based platforms. This paper presents a methodology tailored to the specific requirements of users who are seeking support in extracting and representing procedural knowledge from documents. We introduce a tool designed to support users in manually annotating procedures within PDF documents and generating a corresponding procedural knowledge graph. We assess the tool in real-world scenarios, aimed at evaluating its effectiveness in accomplishing various tasks. Finally, we generate a procedural knowledge graph that can facilitate knowledge discovery.