Why ontology-based product modeling

In my opinion, there are two primary product development needs that are
to the point regarding what one wants to *do* in and the role of an
Ontology-Based product modeling tools. I am using Product Modeling in a
broad sense that includes product development system engineering, etc.


The first need is to have consistent terminology with well-defined
meaning that is stated independently of (the interpretation by) subject
matter experts.  Terminology with semantics is needed to facilitate and
reuse information across specific applications within a broad community
of interest.  This is a primary use of OWL in life sciences etc.  

The second need is for consistency checking and verification tasks.
Such tasks can be stated in terms of relationships between product
modeling classes and properties of individuals in these classes. For
example, one may want to check that a collection of requirements are
consistent.  This task can be expressed in terms of a class being
consistent which means that it has models.  This kind of reasoning can
be performed in an appropriate framework.  In my current job is
concerned with, for example, verification that product versions that
have been built according to a specific design also satisfy specific
requirements such as weight restrictions.  Reasoning is intrinsic to
these kinds of tasks, as are observation and measurement.    

Current system engineering and product development language standards
and the tools that operate on the KBs in the languages of standards do
not address semantics and reasoning.  The languages may be sufficiently
expressive but there is no formal semantics.  OWL 1.1 has been used to
satisfy the first need for life sciences as it has such as semantics and
so that is why it is a natural candidate for product modeling.  

Ian and I have attempted to articulate these two needs for reasoning
capability in the OWLED paper, and we have been trying to work through
some specific reasoning examples for problems expressed in OWL 1.1. I
hope that we will have these examples completed for the fall OWLED.
What we are doing is only a first step.  There needs to be a lot of work
like this kind of exploration to really figure out what one really needs
and how it should be done. Conrad and I have been having a lot of
discussion about this kind of thing.  The results of that conversation
are in the document that we submitted to this XG.  

I completely agree that "we really should gather use cases &
requirements, not simply about expressivity in common PM modeling tasks,
but also about what those models are intended to support, w/r/t
reasoning services."

- Henson

Received on Wednesday, 4 June 2008 20:04:49 UTC