Manufacturing information integration using an object-oriented knowledge framework

The information retrieval aspect of heterogeneous information systems is discussed. Most manufacturing facilities contain information bases which are independently designed. The information bases denote persistent fact databases as well as meta-databases, typically knowledge bases. In such an environment, improvement in manufacturing performance can be obtained by sharing data in a manufacturing complex. An approach to this end is to build a knowledge base architecture which can incorporate existing heterogeneous databases with nonconventional data types such as object-oriented databases, or rulebases. To capture the global view of manufacturing databases with the rich semantics of knowledge bases, an object-oriented data model is used as a canonical data model. Based on the proposed structure, various methods of information retrieval are described. A query language ODML is presented as a global query language