The Role of Ontologies in Virtual Engineering

The approach of computer-based concurrent engineering of products, denoted as virtual engineering (VE), has been emerged to meet the requirements in product development due to increasing competition. To enhance the information transfer between engineering groups, a domain- independent component structure is preferred. Product libraries as well as conceptual product information can be automatically derived and exchanged by domain terminologies. The ontology approach, as a concept of the Semantic Web to explicitly represent the semantics of data, promises a superior view. In order to enable information exchange ontologies as a neutral description form are necessary, to bind different attribute labels with equivalent content to the given concepts. Furthermore an integration of new domains and libraries becomes possible. This paper aims to identify and analyze application areas for the usage of formal ontologies and introduces solutions for the integration of heterogeneous libraries.