Ontology querying and its software component for design support in supply chains

Effective support of product design stage in the supply chain is important for raising the competitive power of a company. Existing technology for design support of supply chain has limitations on managing semantic data and handling logical operations, which agents will use for their intelligent and autonomous activities. In this paper, we suggest an ontology querying mechanism and software component for it, based on the supply chain network, for the agent´s intelligent activities. This querying engine can service several operations, including reasoning and logical functions, together with the ontology of the specified domain of product attributes and its instance data. We defined operators to provide the necessary ontology query according to the operation category in the domain of design support in SCM, which were provided as several interfaces in the form of server side components and Web service. Finally, we explain the meaning of our querying system, comparing with the early version and other querying systems.