Feature transformations between application-specific feature spaces

Information sets (features) used in engineering design and manufacturing applications depend on the product type, the application and the process involved. Some features identified in a particular domain may be partially or fully mappable to other domains, while it may be that others are not. To integrate software for design, analysis and manufacturing, it is necessary to create feature mapping systems to transform information in shared or neutral databases to application-specific features most suited to a given reasoning process. The author identifies several transformation/mapping mechanisms, and discusses the implementation of a mapping shell for some of these transformations