Layered Product Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with OWL & SWRL

Traditionally, product development process has required knowledge management techniques to capture information and knowledge about design. In the meantime, the necessity for sharing and exchanging not only product data but also semantics of product data has been arisen because of the use of various software tools and product data models in distributed product development environment. The main focus of this research has been on exploiting implicit engineers' design knowledge by explicitly expressing and sharing the knowledge through terms representing semantics of product data. In particular, it considers that distributed product design data can be semantically integrated by using ontology on which implicit design knowledge can be captured in the form of IF-THEN rule. Thus, in this paper, we use the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is a Description Logic based ontology language, to represent product data and the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), which is a rule based ontology language, to express design knowledge for car air purifiers in Protege. Then, this paper shows how OWL product data model and SWRL design knowledge can support design decision making of car air purifiers by their reasoning. In addition, it also demonstrates how SWRL can complement OWL to build product data model as well.