Integration of product models by ontology development

A major issue in product development is the exchange and sharing of product knowledge among many actors. This knowledge includes many concepts such as design history, component structure, features, parameters, and more. Thus, to efficiently share design information, the design intent should be persistently captured and the semantics of the modeling terms should be processed both by design collaborators and intelligent systems. Our research investigates the use of Semantic Web technologies for the exchange of “intelligent” CAD models, while maintaining the original relations among entities of the model. Thus, we have proposed an ontological approach based on the construction of a common design features ontology, used as an Interlingua for the exchange of product data. This ontology is represented formally with OWL DL (Web Ontology Language). The ontologies integration process relies basically on reasoning capabilities provided by description logics in order to recognize automatically additional mappings among ontologies entities.