ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH OF ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE TO SUPPORT COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiting a knowledge management editor tool to structure organizational knowledge and integrate it with product development activities. An organizational knowledge framework for capturing and representing manufacturing know-how has been developed using an ontological approach. The captured knowledge is converted into the industrystandard eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) and then shared within a web-centric Product Data Management (PDM) enterprise system to support a collaborative and distributed product development environment. The benefit of adopting such an approach is the closer integration between the activities taking place during early design stage. In particular, the effectiveness of decision making is increased.