Ontology-based knowledge framework for product development

Abstract

Although information systems let manufacturing companies have a lot of development data, engineers do not know how to manage those huge data. So knowledge management is required to guide the engineers with comprehensive knowledge. In this paper, we propose the ontology-based knowledge framework for the product development. The framework composes of the three levels of knowledge. Lowest level is axioms, which explicitly and formally specify the semantics of concepts and relations. Middle level is a knowledge map, which defines the common domain knowledge that domain experts agree with. The knowledge map can guide engineers which design data are required for their tasks. Highest level is a specialized knowledge for domain which gives the solution of a specific task or problem. The specialized knowledge is classified into three knowledge types; expert knowledge, engineering function and data-analysis-based knowledge. The framework has a uniform representation; first order logic to integrate the three levels smoothly. We implement a prototype of the framework using prolog and test the example queries to show the effectiveness of the framework.