Towards a general ontology of multidisciplinary collaborative design for Semantic Web applications

While much of multidisciplinary design knowledge can be found over the Internet, current engineering modelling techniques have limited capabilities of knowledge sharing and distributed problem solving because of a lack of a common understanding of design rationales across disciplines. This paper describes a preliminary attempt at using a Semantic Web paradigm as a step towards a general ontology of multidisciplinary collaborative design, which is needed to share, exchange and reuse multidisciplinary design knowledge in a distributed design environment. The ontology presented consists of a rich set of class constructs with cross-disciplinary mapping features for annotating the multidisciplinary engineering models on the Semantic Web so that the annotated models become machine understandable, facilitating the data consistency and knowledge reuse for collaborative work among multidisciplinary organisations. A case study for representing a general ontology of multidisciplinary design of automatic assembly systems for cross-disciplinary collaboration in the prototype system is shown to validate the implementation of the proposed approach. The developed ontology provides hierarchical conceptual interrelationships of diverse design concepts, so that a design consensus is fostered to facilitate semantic annotation, access and retrieval of engineering models across different disciplines.