An Ontological Schema for Sharing Conceptual Engineering Knowledge

In the engineering design, engineers have been suffering the difficulty in sharing conceptual engineering knowledge about functionality representing design rationales because of lack of rich common vocabulary for functionality. In order to promote sharing of such knowledge, we have developed an ontological framework for its modeling including layered ontologies, which provides rich concepts for describing consistent and reusable knowledge. This article summarizes the framework and the successful deployment in a company. In the context of the semantic web, our framework can be viewed as a metadata schema of documents about engineering devices. This article also discusses metadata from the viewpoint of functionality as a usage of our ontologies in the semantic web.