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The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: A case study from the aero industry

The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: A case study from the aero industry
The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: A case study from the aero industry
The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). The evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. To capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base. This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. In order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, we believe that it is important to understand the assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable; we refer to these as “application conditions”. We hypothesise that an explicit representation of constraints together with the corresponding application conditions and the appropriate domain ontology could be used by a system to support the maintenance of constraints. In this paper, we focus on the important role the domain ontology plays in supporting the maintenance of constraints.
Constraints, Application Conditions, Ontology, Maintenance
151-172
Sleeman, Derek
9ede413a-aca9-4bf7-bb65-dc0b0f398f0a
Ajit, Suraj
3b27537e-54d0-432e-828e-a4d6ee2aadbc
Fowler, David W
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Knott, David
5a332944-162b-4fc0-ab81-4ff053bb2982
Sleeman, Derek
9ede413a-aca9-4bf7-bb65-dc0b0f398f0a
Ajit, Suraj
3b27537e-54d0-432e-828e-a4d6ee2aadbc
Fowler, David W
20600aae-3dc2-4a5f-98fe-5c1dd02ad792
Knott, David
5a332944-162b-4fc0-ab81-4ff053bb2982

Sleeman, Derek, Ajit, Suraj, Fowler, David W and Knott, David (2008) The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: A case study from the aero industry. Journal of Applied Ontology, 3, 151-172.

Record type: Article

Abstract

The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). The evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. To capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base. This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. In order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, we believe that it is important to understand the assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable; we refer to these as “application conditions”. We hypothesise that an explicit representation of constraints together with the corresponding application conditions and the appropriate domain ontology could be used by a system to support the maintenance of constraints. In this paper, we focus on the important role the domain ontology plays in supporting the maintenance of constraints.

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More information

Published date: 2008
Keywords: Constraints, Application Conditions, Ontology, Maintenance
Organisations: Electronics & Computer Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 271807
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/271807
PURE UUID: 0139c340-b079-4347-b8d0-38a11c159604

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Date deposited: 17 Dec 2010 15:29
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:39

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Contributors

Author: Derek Sleeman
Author: Suraj Ajit
Author: David W Fowler
Author: David Knott

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