Progress with OntoCAD: A Standardised Ontological Annotation Approach to CAD Systems

As critical components of PLM systems, CAD/CAM systems have been actively developed for decades. There are, however, still research challenges confronting global competition and the ever changing market in the mechanical engineering domain. This includes collaboration within the internal enterprise and across enterprises externally, system integration, and knowledge representation and sharing across multiple engineering viewpoints. The OntoCAD approach has been proposed in previous work, in which multiple engineering viewpoints can be semantically represented, managed and further processed, assisting with system integration, knowledge sharing and reuse. This paper presents an extension of this research providing an update on the progress in two aspects. The first aspect is the exploration of a STEP-compliant anchoring mechanism for OntoCAD's semantic annotations to achieve compatibility between systems and maintain data integrity during data exchange. The second aspect is the application of cost estimation as a case study illustrating the representation of cost from an engineering viewpoint, and therefore supporting a costing application to validate the approach. Keyword: annotation, ontology, CAD systems, collaboration, STEP.

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