Collaborative Development and Use of Ontologies for Design

In this paper, we introduce ontology-centric knowledge organization approach to realize design knowledge base system for sharing and reuse of knowledge. Since ontology is used here as an intermediate level of information representation between the model and media level of information, it can work to bridge multiple models and multiple users. DesignersAmplifier is a workbench for designers where they can store, organize their information resources, and also can communicate to other designers based on the ontology-centric knowledge organization. DesignersAmplifier helps designers to organize documents with ontology. For example, it can rebuild documents as hypertexts of which hyper-links are linked to concepts in ontology. It can help designers to expand search words by ontology or by collocation data in documents. DesignersAmplifier can help communication among designers by exchanging ontologies. We realized exchanging ontologies by mobile agent architecture.