Data integration in product lifecycle management: An ontology-based approach

one of today's hottest topics in information technology is integration, that is how to achieve seamless information communication and correct data exchange between heterogeneous environments. In the present work, we deal with this problem in a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) perspective. We are mainly concerned with the integration of diverse product information throughout the entire product lifecycle, ranging from conception, through design, to manufacture, operation and destruction. This paper presents a new integration approach in the context of mechanical products, based on ontologies. The approach exploits the idea of a common knowledge or common semantic shared by different lifecycle phases. Thus, integration is performed at the knowledge level. The study is mainly based on some examples of activities (or phases) taken from the product development lifecycle. Including the entire set of activities is out of the scope of this paper, nevertheless, the proposed approach shows enough flexibility and potential to be generalized quite easily to other phases. The approach outlined here shows that ontologies could really help to support the integration process. But this is obtained at the price of a good comprehension and abstraction of the information semantics involved in the different lifecycle phases, which tend to be a more complex task.