An Ontological Approach to Integrated Product and Process Knowledge Modeling for Intelligent Design Repositories

Formal representation of design and manufacturing knowledge in distributed design repositories is a key enabler of autonomous design-to-fabrication. This paper presents an ontological approach to formal representation of product and process knowledge in order to enhance the intelligence of design repositories. The product and process ontology developed in this work is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). A methodology is proposed for part characterization, clustering, and similarity measurement based on the asserted and inferred properties of the part instances in the ontology. Part families are formed according their semantic similarities from the perspective of geometric and non-geometric attributes. Ontology population is conducted semi-automatically assisted by automated feature recognition techniques.