Research On Ontology Mapping Methods In The Product Knowledge Management

With the growing access to heterogeneous and independent product data repositories, the treatment of differences in the structure and semantics of the data stored in those repositories plays a major role in product knowledge systems. As interoperation product information systems increasingly confront more complex knowledge management issues, the technology needed to deal successfully with these issues must focus on not only the syntactic but also the semantic underlying data used by those systems.Recent research has used ontology as the knowledge base that describes concepts through definitions that sufficiently detailed to capture the semantics of a domain. Ontology captures a certain view of the world, supports intensional queries regarding the content of a database, and reflects the relevance of data by providing a declarative description of semantic information independent of the data representation.There is great variation among both the level of detail and logic of different ontology representations. In environments with multiple information systems, independent systems may have their own intended models and, therefore, their own ontologies. To share information among them, an integration process is needed. Comparing concepts is a basic operation in the process. Some mapping measures are applicable in the matching operation.In this thesis, we have deeply investigated this problem under the support of the National Science Fund Project-"The study of Product Information System Based on Ontology and Semantic Web". First, the background of product knowledge management and the involvement of Ontology were discussed. Second, the architectures of ontology integration and all kinds of mapping methods are introduced. Third, the open source ontology management project, KAON, was analyzed, and on the basis of this system, we have developed our ontology mapping module. Finally, we have implemented three typical mapping methods in the mapping module, and applied in an experimental product ontology mapping process. From the experiment results, the strongpoint and drawback of three methods are concluded, which will guide our future research direction.