An ontology-based method for knowledge integration in a collaborative design environment

A collaborative design environment can be viewed as a multi-agent system where each design agent has knowledge about specific domains and can solve different problems. Several agents combine to solve a complex problem through knowledge sharing and inter operation. It is essential to construct an integrated knowledge base to improve the efficiency and consistency of complex problem-solving. An ontology-based knowledge integration framework in a collaborative design environment is presented in this paper. Ontology provides standard vocabulary, technical terminology and a domain model for knowledge integration. The representation and construction of ontology are critic problems for knowledge integration. An object-oriented concept graph representation is presented to represent ontology. It has advantages of both object-oriented methodology and Sowa's conceptual graph. It can be translated into predicate calculus conveniently, and can represent the intension of concepts. In order to improve the efficiency of ontology construction, a semantic-based approach is presented. Firstly, a semantic affinity based clustering algorithm is presented to generate concepts from the term set of multi-agent systems. Then, ontology is constructed based on knowledge.