Product Design Rationale Semantic Representation And Retrieval System

Design rationale has crucial effect on design reuse、sharing and reasoning. How to establish proper representation model for design rationale has become necessary premise for its future application. As the development of semantic and ontology technology and its great advantage for knowledge representation, it has great prospect in mechanical design. The paper introduces semantic and ontology technology to design rationale representation model, and develops a semantic retrieval system.At first, the paper does some research on product design rationale representation model and the feature of different models. After necessary introduction of ontology technology、 OWL(Web Ontology Language) and ontology construction method, this article suggests a new semantic representation model for design rational, ISAA(Issue,Solution,Artifact and Argument Model,ISAA) model, which is based on the IBIS (Issue-Based Information System, IBIS) model. The ISAA model introduces the ontology-based semantic representation mode to the DR representation and expands the concept elements of IBIS. The DR information is abstracted and defined as seven concepts and relationships between them. These concepts include the issue concept, the solution concept, and the argument concept and so on. The proposed model represents the DR information of a design instance to RDF (Resource Description Framework, RDF) graph and serializes to RDF/XML document. In addition, some specific rules based on SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language, SWRL) language are constructed in the model and added to Jena inference engine. On the base of the work introduced above, the paper develops a semantic retrieval system for product design rationale with Java programming language, which will do great convenience for designer to get product DR information. Finally, a retrieval example of DR information about the spring charge for a high-voltage circuit breaker is given.In summary, we can conclude that ISAA model gives a complete and formulizing expression of product DR information and the retrieval system based on the model can help designers get better understanding of product DR information.