Corporate ontologies and concurrent engineering

Concurrent engineering is based on the co-operation and collaboration of multi-disciplinary people who need to communicate and exchange information. Communication, as well as knowledge sharing and exchanging, are the corner stones of concurrent engineering. But each enterprise’s actor speaks his own language, with his own terms and meanings: the enterprise, and especially the virtual enterprise, is a Tower of Babel. Although the communication problem can be reduced, from a syntactic point of view, by using a single communication language, the semantics problem remains to be addressed. It means that two entities can communicate only if they agree upon on the meaning of the terms they use. Ontology, understood as an agreed vocabulary of common terms and meanings shared by a group of people, is a solution to that problem. This article will present our approach illustrated by the Ontological Knowledge Station (OK Station®). The OK Station is a software environment for defining and using ontologies. It relies on sound principles taking into account epistemological and linguistic notions. The semantics of term is based on elementary units of meaning and binary concept trees. Due to such features, obtaining real agreement about the meaning of terms is a reasonable and reachable goal.