Pilot Study For Ontology & Semantic Web Based Product Knowledge Integration

The competition among enterprises in the 21th century is in knowledge. The production, transfer and utilization of knowledge play a key role in enterprise development. Therefore advanced knowledge management technology is urgently required for product knowledge representation and reasoning.Meanwhile, traditional technology for product information system cannot meet the needs of modern enterprises for its incompetence in the dynamic, distributed and heterogous computing environments and intricate computing contents. Product knowledge integration among enterprises demands shared and consistent semantic based information model and cooperation ability.Along with the spring up of ontology research in AI, the ontology based product representation is a hot issue, which makes the focus of the product representation problem transferred from syntax to semantic. Meanwhile, the emergence of Semantic Web provides product information infrastructure a brand new deploying platform.Ontology & Semantic Web based Product knowledge Integration is a research work which integrates Ontology theory and Semantic Web technology, and solves the knowledge processing problems for manufacturing enterprises, such as information infrastructure, product model representation, product knowledge representation and reasoning, etc.In chapter 1, research background including manufacture technology development in network environment, the evolved product data standards that support knowledge representation, and knowledge based systems are introduced. Research motivation and current hot research topics are also overviewed.Chapter 2 focuses on the principle product ontology theory research. Starting with the definition of ontology in information science, and, theoretically based on the Ontology theory in the sense of Analytical Philosophy, we propose to analyze the two-level building discipline of ontology: one level is of the language tools; and the other of the ontology structure through meta-property analysis. In the part_of related research work, the survey is presented on STEP standard and ontology description languages. Description logic is the choice of the abstract representation language, and OWL as the concrete documents one. Farther more, an ontology reasoning based knowledge integration framework is proposed.In Chapter 3, multi-ontology reasoning problem, i.e. ontology mapping is researched and a synthetical arithmetic is put forward, which use the sub-graphs of ontology to measure the similarity between concepts.In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, description logics based ontology reasoning solution is proposed. Because STEP is widely adapted by industry, the migration of semantic information from EXPRESS Schema and XML Schema to Semantic Web is studied in Charpter6.In Chapter 7, a typical product ontology management system is introduced, which include a ontology server module and ontology annotation module. Some implementation details are also described.In the end, summary of the work in the dissertation, future research directions are also discussed.