A mechanism for semantic enhanced integrated product modeling in collaborative design environment

Complex product development becomes more and more knowledge-intensive. Knowledge integration faces the problems of semantic ambiguity and semantic heterogeneity due to cross-functional teams and multiple cross-domain applications involved in collaborative design environment. To address these problems, this paper presents a mechanism for integrated product modeling with semantic enhancing through ontology technology. Core ontology is constructed to provide a shared semantic foundation. By mapping core ontology according application contexts, application ontologies are built to explicit the application specific semantics. Based on these, core product model containing kernel information of a product and domain models are constructed. To support semantic interoperability, a multi-strategies based semantic reconcile method through core ontology is proposed to discover semantic correspondences between domain ontologies.