Modelling of Reusable Product Knowledge in Terminological Logics: a Case Study

Our project aims to automatically generating multilingual text for product maintenance, and documentation tasks from a structured knowledge representation. The substructure consists of both product speciic as well as general technical domain knowledge. In particular, this is reusable knowledge about product functions, geometry and their composition, represented in a terminologi-cal knowledge representation system. The language independent representation is also designed to allow for the qualitative simulation of the documentation steps. This paper describes the implementation of some key modules, illustrated by a household toaster example. Our main implementation goals were reusability, extensibility and understandability of the representation. We discuss problems concerning the identiication of relevant domain concepts, the realisation of part{whole relationships with the capability to propagate qualities (from parts to whole or vice versa), and the deenition of electrical devices in order to allow for the qualitative simulation of process steps.