Ontology Based Knowledge Modeling for Structural Engineering Experiment Information Management

Structural engineering experiment plays an important role in the civil infrastructure design and research. The diversity and heterogeneity of information representation among multiple experimental sites makes the experiment information integration difficult and lead to the poor accuracy when making the keyword matching-based information ret rival. Aiming on this issue, an ontology-based knowledge model called SEKM is proposed in this paper. Based on the domain knowledge, SEKM is composed of the concept model SEDO(Structural Engineering Domain Ontology) and the rule base SERB(Structural Engineering Rule Base), and provide the uniform experiment information representation in the structural engineering field. To enhance the knowledge representation power of SEKM, an evolution-based rule base optimization method is present, which enrich the rule base with the online analysis of the statistical information about SEKM accessing. SEKM is initially implemented based on OWL 2 specification and has been adopted in the experiment information management by Structural Engineering Experimental Center of Beijing University of Technology.