A Methodology of Engineering Ontology Development for Information Retrieval
Zhanjun Li, Raskin Victor, Karthik Ramani · 2007
When engineering content is created and applied during the product lifecycle, it is often stored and forgotten. Since search remains text-based, engineers do not have the means to harness and reuse past designs, experiences, and mistakes. On the other hand, current information retrieval approaches based on statistical methods and keyword matching are not directly applicable to the engineering domain. The long term goal of this research is to develop an engineering ontology based computational framework in order to (1) structure unstructured engineering documents; and (2) achieve more effective information retrieval. This paper focuses on the method and process that acquire and evaluate the engineering ontology. We propose a principled, systematic, and semi-automatic ontology development methodology that is based on ontological semantics and is integrated with Protégé, one of the most widely used ontology engineering tools. The methodology is applied in acquiring the established engineering knowledge from various resources. A preliminary test based on engineering catalogs, CAD drawings, and project reports has been conducted. The results validate the effectiveness of the engineering ontology as well as the methodology.