An Ontology-Based Collaborative Reasoning Strategy for Multidisciplinary Design in the Semantic Grid

Aiming at representing and reasoning about multidisciplinary design knowledge explicitly and exchanging it in different design environments, this paper proposes an ontology-based collaborative reasoning strategy for multidisciplinary design in the Semantic Grid. An ontology-based modeling framework is used as the basis, which adopts Web Ontology Language (OWL) to build a domain-specific multidisciplinary design repository, and allows the design agents to visit ontology repository effectively through ontology-based services. On the top of modeling framework we propose a multi-agent collaborative reasoning environment, which utilizes OWL as the content language of FIPA ACL, and supports the ontology-based collaborative reasoning for multidisciplinary design between multiple design agents. This important enhancement facilitates the implementation of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in multidisciplinary design for Semantic Grid applications.