Encountering the Physical World

Manufacturing and product design are grounded in the physical world. The entire product lifecycle involves a wide range of integrated tasks that focus on the properties of physical objects, beginning with begins with the design of physical objects and the specification of the materials from which the physical objects are made. Thus, reasoning tasks within manufacturing and product design requires an ontology of physical world. In this paper, we present the current status of a project that is developing a suite of ontologies, which are modules of an overarching ontology called the PhysicalWorld Ontology. Each module of the PhysicalWorld Ontology captures a particular class of physical phenomena or property of physical objects, such as shape, location, connectedness, parthood, and kinetic and kinematic behaviour.