Ontology-based information integration and sharing for collaborative part and tooling development

One critical factor in collaborative part and tooling development is the information integration and sharing. After analyzing characteristics of the collaboration process, the problem of information integration and sharing is transformed into a problem of domain ontology integration and sharing. First, an activity model is presented to describe interactions among domains of part, process, and tooling. Next, three local ontologies are constructed to serve as formal, explicit specifications of domain-specific information. To integrate local ontologies as global ontology, the relations and constrains among domains are explicitly represented using Semantic Web Rule Language. Then, the ontology sharing method via similarity matching is studied. Finally, the proposed approach is demonstrated by a case.