A Systematic Approach to Engineering Knowledge Organization and Modeling

Abstract

Capturing engineering domain knowledge is a challenging problem due to several factors such as the complexity of the knowledge as well as the multiplicity of the representation techniques with varying underlying syntax and semantics. The existing approaches for knowledge capture and organization in engineering are typically ad hoc in nature, which inhibit efficient knowledge sharing and deployment. The objective of this paper is to introduce a systematic methodology for knowledge capture, organization, and modeling in the manufacturing domain. The proposed methodology focuses on the conceptualization phase and utilizes Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) early in the process for creating a controlled vocabulary, or thesaurus, in the domain of interest. The resulting SKOS-based thesaurus is a lightweight ontology that helps identify the core concepts that will be translated into formal classes in an axiomatic ontology such as MSDL. The proposed methodology is discussed with the aid of examples from metal casting domain. Also, use of Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) for representation of constraint knowledge is discussed in this paper.