Developing an Ontology for Joints in Furniture Design

Ontologies help represent knowledge as a hierarchy of concepts within a domain and highlights the relationships between these concepts. Many businesses implement ontologies to use it to create and define their enterprise architecture framework. Business that specialize in customization use ontologies not only to define their business model but to use it to make inferences and grow their capabilities. In this paper we create an ontology of joints for a furniture customization company that could be used to make further inferences about all the possible furniture combinations in the scope of the domain. To achieve this objective, axioms that describe the various joint types are specified in first order logic and tested in Prover9/Mace4. The results demonstrate that the ontology captures the intended semantics of the different types of joints within furniture manufacturing and can be extended to make further inferences about possible furniture compositions.