A semantic annotation framework to assist the knowledge interoperability along a product life cycle

The interoperability among a variety of systems, in or across manufacturing enterprises, has been widely accepted as one of the important factors that affects the efficiency of production. The aim of this study is to deal with the semantic interoperability issues in a product lifecycle management environment. Through the investigation of related works, the need for the formalization of semantic annotation was discovered. This paper addresses this drawback and introduces a framework that uses formalized semantic annotations to assist the knowledge interoperability along a product life cycle. Introduction In recent years, more and more manufacturing enterprises have discovered and considered the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach as one of essential solutions to create competitive products. A major current focus in PLM researches is how to ensure a seamless interoperability among different enterprise systems at each stage of a Product Life Cycle (PLC) [1]. Interoperability is an ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged [2]. However, because stakeholders who operate those systems along a PLC have different backgrounds, heterogeneous expertise, unique knowledge, particular needs and specific practices, which over increase the difficulty to achieve interoperability in semantic level [3]. Ontology is a kind of common agreement on the conceptualization of terms in a specific domain of interest [4]. One of the widely recognized methods to deal with semantic gaps is to semantically enrich the exchanged information through an ontology. There exist many studies that highlighted and proved the advantages of applying semantic annotations on various kinds of models, which represent a product from different perspectives. For example, research [5] and [6] focused on annotating data models to support data integration. Research [7] and [8] developed annotation tools to demonstrate the possibility of sharing and reusing the knowledge that is represented in a computer-aided design model. Research [9] and [10] suggested to annotate business process models with semantic contents for assisting designers and analysts in the management of their models. And more generally, research [11] and [12] proposed high level semantic annotation methods for the semantic enrichment of all kinds of enterprise models. Even though lots of efforts were made for addressing the issues related to semantic interoperability, few researchers have paid attention to the formalization perspective of semantic annotations. The objective of this study is to deal with the interoperability problems, mainly the issue of semantic interoperability, through introducing a formal semantic annotation framework. This framework is then being adapted in a new application scenario, to firstly realize the semantic enrichment of models, to secondly assist the knowledge interoperation, and to lastly show its adaptability.