Product Ontology. An Ontology for Complex Product Modelling Domains

VEGETTI, MARCELA; HENNING, GABRIELA; LEONE, HORACIO

Village Rio das Pedras, Río de Janeiro, Brasil

Congreso; ENPROMER 2005 4th Mercosur Congress on Process Systems Engineering; 2005

UFRJ

Increasing product complexity, growing competition, emerging globalization, and stronger customer focus force the majority of enterprises to network their own geographically dispersed sites and to extensively cooperate with customers or suppliers introducing the need of sharing product information. Nowadays, Web-based Product Data Management (PDM) systems are emerging in order to offer support to the global supply chains that new TICs introduce. Integration of global supply chains implies three aspects: technical, syntactical and semantics integration. Internet and Web technology give support for both first aspects while the latter may be solve through the definition of ontologies, one of the pillars over which Semantic Web is built. An ontology is an explicit and formal specification of a shared conceptualization and provides a conceptual framework for talking about an application domain. This contribution introduces an ontology for the domain of Complex Product modelling. It first introduces the concepts related to the semantic Web and ontologies. Then, an overview of the Complex Product Modeling domain is presented. Finally, the proposed product ontology is discussed. PRoduct ONTOlogy (PRONTO) defines concepts, relations among them and axioms to be apply in the complex product modeling domain. It considers products with hybrid structures and concepts related to the variant management.