A method for building ontology-based electronic document management systems for quality standards—the case study of the ISO/TS 16949:2002 automotive standard

Different methods and methodologies have been developed for building ontologies. However, neither of these methods consider to build an ontology with characteristics of an electronic document management system (EDMS) nor define the basic classes to begin the ontology. In this paper we propose a method, called “OntoDocMan”, to build an ontology-based EDMS which captures the knowledge associated with a company’s processes related to a quality standard. We leverage the use of ontology tools, such as Protégé, to obtain the functionality of an EDMS. Our method complements and details the On-To-Knowledge methodology during its ontology development phase. The essential point of our method is to make it easy to develop an EDMS for quality standards by means of an ontology-based system. The OntoDocMan method is illustrated by a case study for developing an ontology based on the ISO/TS 16949, which is a Technical Specification (TS) and we show that the Ontology system is friendly and easy to use as any EDMS. Different from common EDMS, our ontology-based EDMS is developed without any programming. In addition, we have discovered that this kind of ontology-based EDMS is an excellent tool for helping auditors to search and validate information, besides new employees can learn about the company’s processes.