A Three Level Abstraction Hierarchy To Represent Product Structural Information

VEGETTI, MARCELA; LEONE, HORACIO; HENNING, GABRIELA

Funchal, Madeira

Congreso; ICEIS 2010, 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems; 2010

INSTIC - IFIP

Product models should integrate and efficiently manage all the information associated with products in the context of industrial enterprises or supply chains (SCs). Nowadays, it is quite common for an organization and even, each area within a company, to have its own product model. This situation leads to information duplication and its associated problems. In addition, traditional product models do not properly handle the high number of variants managed in today competitive markets. Therefore, there is a need for an integrated product model to be shared by the organizations participating in global SCs or all areas within a company. One way to reach an intelligent integration among product models is by means of an ontology. PRONTO (PRoduct ONTOlogy) is an ontology for the Product Modelling domain, able to efficiently handle product variants. This contribution presents a ConceptBase formalization of PRONTO, as well as an extension of it that allows the inference of product structural knowledge and the specification of valid products.