Semantic organization of product lifecycle information through a modular ontology

It is known that one of the main reasons of the success of manufacturing enterprises is their ability to design and maintain a coherent structure to represent their knowledge, especially the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which are not often organized to manage information efficiently. Several commercial PLM systems have been developed in the last years to help companies in organizing their large amount of data, but they are rarely exploited mainly due to the high cost and difficult customization. Recent trends in literature focused on the development of semantic knowledge management systems, both to help companies in organizing and sharing their data and to allow the easy finding of information and its reuse. The aim of this paper is to develop a knowledge management system to structure the product lifecycle knowledge of SMEs based on a modular ontology. The modular ontology contains a reference ontology to represent the main concepts with their relationships, and several domain-specific ontologies to specialize and enrich the reference ontology with specific information. Particularly, this paper is focused on the specification of the reference ontology with a manufacturing process ontology module. Some examples of the usage of the system to extract information through SPARQL queries are also presented. © 2015, North Atlantic University Union. All rights reserved.