Developing manufacturing ontologies for knowledge reuse in distributed manufacturing environment

Abstract

The use of ontologies for knowledge sharing and distributed collaboration has been widely recognised in the knowledge modelling community, but the lack of a systematic and constructive methodology for developing manufacturing ontologies has impeded their wide usage for knowledge reuse in distributed manufacturing environments. This paper presents a constructive, two-level knowledge modelling approach to systematically develop manufacturing ontologies using both software engineering and Semantic Web paradigms. The UML/OCL (Unified Modeling Language/Object Constraint Language)-based object modelling is used first to serve as a graphical and structured basis for conceptual communication between domain experts and knowledge engineers. The OWL/SWRL (Web Ontology Language/Semantic Web Rule Language)-based ontology modelling then extends the UML/OCL-based object models with added semantics using a progressive, semantics-oriented knowledge acquisition method. An illustrative example for manufacturing ontology development in the manufacturing industry for producing electronic connectors is used to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed approach.

Keywords:

• distributed manufacturing
• knowledge reuse
• manufacturing ontology
• Semantic Web
• Unified Modeling Language (UML)
• Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Acknowledgements

The work has been supported by the National High-Tech. R&D Program, China (No. 2009AA04Z151), China National Natural Science Foundation (No. 50975250, No. 60703042), Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation of China (No. Y1080170, No. Z1090461, No. Y1090351) and Zhejiang Science & Technology Plan of China (No. 2009C31116).