A method of constructing product ontology for collabrative semantics sharing

This paper presents a method of building a core product ontology to improve semantic interoperability when sharing knowledge among multiple domains in collaborative product development. The core product ontology represents a consensus understanding and is organized into three layers varying in level of abstraction: top-level concepts, generic concepts, and primitive terms. It is constructed by combining top-down and bottom-up strategies. The top-down strategy is used to build top-level concepts by reusing some existing valuable ontologies, while bottom-up strategy is used to build concepts in the other two layers by fully utilizing domain resources such as commercially systems and engineering documents.