Product data interoperability based on layered reference ontology

Abstract

In order to cope with the rapidly changing product development environment, manufacturing enterprises are forced to collaborate with each other through establishing a virtual organization. In collaboration, designated organizations work together for a mutual gain based on product data interoperability. However, product data interoperability is not fully facilitated due to the semantic inconsistency among product data models of enterprises. In order to overcome the semantic inconsistency problem, this paper proposes a reference ontology called Reference Domain Ontology (RDO) and a methodology for supporting product data interoperability with semantic consistency using RDO. RDO describes the semantics of product data model and metamodel for all application domains in a virtual organization. Using RDO, application domains in a virtual organization can easily understand product data models of others without model transformation. RDO is built by a hybrid approach of top-down using an upper ontology and bottom-up based on the merging of ontologies of application domains in a virtual organization.