Ontological knowledge integration and sharing for collaborative product development

The product development process is knowledge intensive, involving the retrieval and reuse of sometimes heterogeneous knowledge. As the exchange of this knowledge can be challenging in a distributed environment, this paper presents a two-stage approach to integrate and share product knowledge effectively. The first stage is ontology integration. Through ontology mapping and merging, product knowledge from the local ontologies is integrated into a global ontology, and any repetitive knowledge is removed. The second stage is knowledge sharing. In the multiple ontologies, product knowledge is exchanged through multi-agents, and all the knowledge is retrieved. As a result, product knowledge is shared between the global and local ontologies, and among the local ontologies. A case on the Nose Landing Gear (NLG) product development is presented to highlight the potential of the proposed method.