Using an inference engine to detect conflicts in collaborative design

Integrate multidisciplinary virtual teams in collaborative design process is a hard task to tackle with. Differences of background, culture and expertise usually lead to conflicting situations. Moreover, if we consider to be working on a synchronous environment — where all designers exchange data and share information at the same time that the product design is being done — potential knowledge representation conflicts can also arise from this process. In our work we currently represent knowledge in collaborative design by using Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is structured to be a major formalism for the design and dissemination of ontology information. The use of OWL reasoning is intended to be a consistent way to verify the information given by several experts, trying to avoid redundancies, contradictions and misunderstood. This paper presents an approach to detect collaborative design conflicts through the use of an OWL inference engine.