Ontology Engineering for Product Development

This analysis is to identify requirements for a Description Logic (DL) to reason about product descriptions and other information related to product development. The DL is intended to be used by software decision support systems to assist in verification of product satisfaction criteria. Decision support requires the capability to express assertions about products and assemble evidence to demonstrate that the assertions are satisfied. Satisfaction criteria involve processing large amounts of data and so present significant scale up challenges for software systems. The analysis indicates need for the expressiveness found in OWL-DL, as well as additional descriptive expressiveness and inference rules. Experience with large scale information systems indicate that reasoning capability can be scaled up to serve large user communities. The use of reasoning capability can have significant cost and savings impact on product development