Ontology-based modeling of structural knowledge for modular mechanical products

Although importance of knowledge sharing among designers has been widely recognized, the knowledge about structure, functionality and behavior in the modular mechanical product design is often scattered across technical domain. In this paper, aiming at capturing structural knowledge, the knowledge externalization framework for modular mechanical product is developed based on modular structural ontology which provides fundamental concepts for capturing the target domain and a common vocabulary for description of modular structure knowledge. Finally, the methodology discussed in the paper is implemented with the semantic Web technologies and a case of modular design for machine tool structure.