An Upper Level Ontological Model for Engineering Design Performance Domain

The paper presents our upper level lightweight descriptive model for the set of the Core ontologies of PSI1 Suite. While PSI Suite of Ontologies is an interlinked modular library of ontologies describing the domain of engineering design performance in microelectronics, PSI upper level ontology is more domain-independent. It is a model of stateful creative dynamic processes, pro-active agents, and objects situated in nested dynamic environments based on formal representation of time, events, and happenings. It may be used as an upper level theory for domain ontologies in different application domains having common features. PSI upper level ontology is designed as a semantic bridge facilitating to mapping PSI Domain ontologies to abstract ontological foundations and common sense. It is also used as semantic "glue" for bridging PSI ontologies with other theories, widely accepted in the domains where processes, states, and participating objects are the major entities. These mappings and semantic bridges are supposed to case the commitment of potential users to PSI Suite. PSI upper level ontology is also used as a "proxy" for different kinds of evaluation of PSI ontologies in frame of our "shaker modeling" methodology for ontology refinement.