Research Of Printing Inventory Management System Based On Ontology

Every production activity in printing company has close relation with controlling and processing materials, money and information. Lots of information in production activities has great importance for companies to make production plans. As inventory management has tight connection with every production process, printing companies have focused on improving inventory management to gain more profits. However, many small or medium printing companies still use traditional and manual management methods. Too many human interventions make the delivery of information inefficient. Some companies, which have introduced ERP to help with inventory management, have also met some various problems. For example, ERP is too complex and multi-functional, and it cannot interact with the other systems. When there comes an urgent or special order, the system is useless. This paper started from inventory information management in printing companies and built a normalized inventory information ontology which can be used as a model to design the inventory information management system. The system provides a reasonable and efficient solution to manage inventory information. The main contents are listed as follow:At first, this paper summarized the current situation of inventory information management in printing industry and analyzed the research trend of particular management systems such as ERP. We also illustrated both the chances and the challenges brought by using ERP and explained the significance of system interaction and information sharing. Then, we analyzed the application of ontology in system modeling and pointed the necessity of introducing ontology into building the inventory information management system. According to the workflow of inventory management in printing company, we combed the key points and extracted important concepts and terms. And we built the inventory information ontology using Protege. At last, this paper took the built ontology as a model and developed a prototype system on NetBeans using Java and JSF.We have designed the ontology-based inventory information management system and realized some functions. The ontology-based inventory information management system in printing companies makes the delivery of information in production activities fast and timely. At the same time, the system regulated the workflow in inventory management. It can help increase the turnover of inventory, and avoid inventory overstocking or shortage.