Ontologies of electronic devices in DAML+OIL for automated product design services in the Semantic Web

The DARPA Agent Mark-up Language + Ontology Inference Layer (DAML+OIL) is a new language that is currently in research stage for the development of the next generation Internet envisioned to become the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is anticipated to understand meaning and offer advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) based services to the users. Among the many types of services that can potentially be constructed in the Semantic Web is automated electronic product design service. A primary asset that is required for such a service is ontologies for electronic devices in machine interpretable form. In this thesis, prototype partial ontologies were developed for a number of electronic devices in DAML+OIL. It was assessed that DAML+OIL can be readily used to develop ontologies for describing the DC electrical characteristics of the devices but not the AC characteristics. It was also determined that Unified Modeling Language (UML) will require extensions to fully model ontologies developed in DAML+OIL.