Developing manufacturing ontologies for knowledge reuse in distributed manufacturing environment
Lanfen Lin, W. Y. Zhang, Yitian Lou, Changyong Chu, Ming Cai · International Journal of Production Research · 2010
The use of ontologies for knowledge sharing and distributed collaboration has been widely recognised in the knowledge modelling community, but the lack of a systematic and constructive methodology for developing manufacturing ontologies has impeded their wide usage for knowledge reuse in distributed manufacturing environments. This paper presents a constructive, two-level knowledge modelling approach to systematically develop manufacturing ontologies using both software engineering and Semantic Web paradigms. The UML/OCL (Unified Modeling Language/Object Constraint Language)-based object modelling is used first to serve as a graphical and structured basis for conceptual communication between domain experts and knowledge engineers. The OWL/SWRL (Web Ontology Language/Semantic Web Rule Language)-based ontology modelling then extends the UML/OCL-based object models with added semantics using a progressive, semantics-oriented knowledge acquisition method. An illustrative example for manufacturing ontology development in the manufacturing industry for producing electronic connectors is used to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed approach.