A service-oriented approach to engineering ontology development for product lifecycle processes

This paper presents a service-oriented methodology for ontology modeling and engineering to support the semantics-based integration of manufacturing systems and processes. The proposed methodology is based on the OWL-S semantic service description framework. It specifies a service-oriented ontological engineering process and a set of methods and techniques to address the issues of semantic description of the virtualized services, standardization, ontology repository, as well as the support for automatic service discovery, composition and interoperation of the ontology-driven software applications. The approach has been used for ontology modeling of product lifecycle processes, such as for developing ontologies of quality assurance processes in the product design. By illustrating the construction of an application service ontology for the design quality process management, this paper shows how the service-oriented approach is used to capture the semantic concepts in the domain. It further describes how the captured semantics are used for OWL-S based service discovery and composition in design quality process management.