Ontological knowledge integration and sharing for collaborative product development

ABSTRACT

The product development process is knowledge intensive, involving the retrieval and reuse of sometimes heterogeneous knowledge. As the exchange of this knowledge can be challenging in a distributed environment, this paper presents a two-stage approach to integrate and share product knowledge effectively. The first stage is ontology integration. Through ontology mapping and merging, product knowledge from the local ontologies is integrated into a global ontology, and any repetitive knowledge is removed. The second stage is knowledge sharing. In the multiple ontologies, product knowledge is exchanged through multi-agents, and all the knowledge is retrieved. As a result, product knowledge is shared between the global and local ontologies, and among the local ontologies. A case on the Nose Landing Gear (NLG) product development is presented to highlight the potential of the proposed method.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge management
• ontology
• agent based systems
• similarity measurement

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on the draft of this paper. The work described in this paper was supported by The Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 71501006, No. 71632008], Shanghai Pujiang Program [Grant No. 16PJ1404500], and Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province [Grant No. 2016GXNSFBA380184].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No.71501006], [Grant No.71632008]; Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province [Grant No.2016GXNSFBA380184];Shanghai Pujiang Program [Grant No. 16PJ1404500];