Knowledge-intensive support for product design with an ontology-based approach

To improve product development decisions and to obtain a competitive advantage, an industry should effectively organize, store and retrieve such knowledge and experience. In this study, a knowledge model in product design domain named the Product Knowledge Model (PKM) is identified including four knowledge types, resource description knowledge, organization competence knowledge, product technology knowledge, and business process knowledge, and is expressed in ontology providing a formal conceptualization of a particular domain. A solution for interconnecting tacit and explicit knowledge resource to support designers making decisions on product design is proposed, considering the same domain ontology set for modeling the knowledge items annotations, the user competency profile, and the task context. A knowledge-intensive support prototype system (KSS) is designed and implemented based on the J2EE programming language and platform.