Semantic classification and query of engineering drawings in the shipbuilding industry

Manufacturing enterprises require an efficient method to manage their engineering drawings. This paper proposes to use ontology to eliminate confusion of semantic concepts in the shipbuilding industry. The proposed management method of engineering drawings is to establish classification trees according to different kinds of classifications in the shipbuilding industry. It also defines the correlation of ship instances, which can facilitate the search process. Moreover, this paper introduces a new algorithm for querying ship instances in conditional sets. The proposed method has been applied in a ship design knowledge management system for sharing and searching ship design data.