Ontology-based modeling of manufacturing information and its semantic retrieval

Abstract

Due to the continuous growing complexity of manufacturing information (MI) and increasing need to exchange this information among various software applications, the unified fundamental manufacturing process data are necessary. This paper put forwards a MI model whose core contents are products, processes, resources and plants, meanwhile, their complex relations are also explained. Aiming to specify the concepts' unambiguous definition and their relationships both in syntax and semantics, this research proposes an ontology modeling approach and constructs the MI model in Ontology Web Language (OWL).Besides, the detailed characteristics of three typical semantic retrieval and visualization plug-ins in protégé are summarized, so as to realize a better understanding of the complex ontology model. In order to share and reuse this model in collaborative working environment, a semantic similarity algorithm is proposed and the procedures of realizing semantic retrieval is discussed, then a prototype system of semantic retrieval in web browser is developed. In the end, an example is given to demonstrate and verify the above work.