Ontology-Based Knowledge Integration for Distributed Product Knowledge Service

Conventional business models focus on providing end products and services regardless of product- or service-related knowledge. Such models are unable to meet customer requirements in the age of knowledge economy. This paper presents an ontology-based knowledge integration approach that is able to handle heterogeneity and variation of knowledge form dynamic distributed knowledge sources so as to support distributed product knowledge service in virtual product and process development. A distributed product knowledge service model was first proposed, which was then followed by design of a web service based framework for knowledge integration. An ontology-based meta-knowledge schema is proposed for defining local knowledge repositories. The technology of semantic similarity comparison is developed to solve the problem of semantic heterogeneity and information variation in ontology integration. The proposed knowledge integration approach is general and is directed towards realizing the concepts of product service, and thus achieving the goals of virtual product and process development.