A manufacturing system engineering ontology model on the semantic web for inter-enterprise collaboration

This paper investigates ontology-based approaches for representing information semantics and in particular the World Wide Web. A general manufacturing system engineering (MSE) knowledge representation scheme, called an MSE ontology model, to facilitate communication and information exchange in inter-enterprise, multi-disciplinary engineering design teams has been developed and encoded in the standard semantic web language. The proposed approach focuses on how to support information autonomy that allows the individual team members to keep their own preferred languages or information models rather than requiring them all to adopt standardized terminology. The MSE ontology model provides efficient access by common mediated meta-models across all engineering design teams through semantic matching. This paper also shows how the primitives of Web Ontology Language (OWL) can be used for expressing simple mappings between the mediated MSE ontology model and individual ontologies. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.