Research on Ontology-Based Multi-source Engineering Information Retrieval in Integrated Environment of Enterprise

With the extensive use of computer aided systems in product design, manufacture and analysis, a mass of documents are produced. These documents provide engineering information in integrated environment of enterprise for engineers, but maintained by different systems in different forms. Current information retrieval approaches usually lack semantic supports for different kinds of documents, which leads to insufficiency of content representation and misunderstanding of query intention. To effectively search engineering information in various documents, and consider semantic information in engineering domain, an ontology-based information retrieval framework is presented. As the center of framework, ontologies are established to support document analysis and query processing through information representation in semantic level, and complete the mapping between user queries and document resources. The framework provides a unified platform for multi-source engineering information retrieval (EIR) from various documents in integrated environment.