Ontological knowledge integration and sharing for collaborative product development
Xiuzhen Li, Zhenyong Wu, Mark Goh, Siqi Qiu · International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing · 2017
The product development process is knowledge intensive, involving the retrieval and reuse of sometimes heterogeneous knowledge. As the exchange of this knowledge can be challenging in a distributed environment, this paper presents a two-stage approach to integrate and share product knowledge effectively. The first stage is ontology integration. Through ontology mapping and merging, product knowledge from the local ontologies is integrated into a global ontology, and any repetitive knowledge is removed. The second stage is knowledge sharing. In the multiple ontologies, product knowledge is exchanged through multi-agents, and all the knowledge is retrieved. As a result, product knowledge is shared between the global and local ontologies, and among the local ontologies. A case on the Nose Landing Gear (NLG) product development is presented to highlight the potential of the proposed method.