Collaboration–oriented Research On Ontology Modeling Of Mechanical Product Design Knowledge

With the tide of knowledge economy, mechanical product design has become increasingly dependent on the effective support of design knowledge, which requires effectual design knowledge modeling. The mechanical product design process is very complex containing multiple tasks and requiring several designers to participate in it. It involves so many kinds of complex knowledge which always has close association with design process and designer. This increases the difficulty of modeling design knowledge.Referring to above problems, the theory of ontology and knowledge collaboration is adopted. This research work mainly on the following three aspects:(1) The analysis of the characteristics of mechanical product design knowledge. Design knowledge must be analyzed in order to build practical and effective knowledge model. Firstly, combining the association between design knowledge and design process, the basic concepts of the design knowledge and its life–cycle and important role in the design process are studied. Secondly, the main features of the design knowledge are summarized. Lastly, the different expressions of the knowledge are adopted to classify the design knowledge.(2) The design knowledge ontology modeling framework is proposed. Firstly, taking account of the knowledge collaboration among multiple object and multiple designers, the main concepts and the relation among them have been researched. Then, the framework of the design knowledge ontology is proposed and the relevant conceptual entity models have been developed. In the framework, there are five basic conceptual entities, such as product instances, design processes, design organizations, documents, knowledge objects, and so on.(3) The expression of kinds of design knowledge. Based on the conceptual entity model founded above, knowledge representation has been studied according to the characteristic of each kind. It is the last step of the modeling and expression of the design knowledge.In the last section of this paper, an ontology instance is established based on Protégé, which is an open-source editing tool for ontology to verify the feasibility of the modeling framework.