オントロジー工学とXML技術に基づく技術知識統合管理プラットフォームの構築

人工物の機能的知識の外化・共有・共創支援基盤の実現

抄録

We propose new knowledge management system, which is based on ontology engineering and XML technology, for manufacturing field. The purpose of this system is to support to externalize implicit functional knowledge of a product that a designer creates, to share the knowledge among those who are involved in the product development, and utilize the knowledge for any designer to collaboratively create or invent new products. It is true, however, there are not a few superior design tool such as CAD/CAE software, simulation tools, etc. Though such tools are indispensable to complete a product, they are insufficient to reveal design rational of a designer that indicates the reason why he/she adopted the function, the structure, materials, etc. Ontology engineering contributes to clarify design rational of any designer by describing a function decomposition tree (hereinafter FDT), which has the specific feature of separating function and way, that is a kind of tree to show functional structure based on device ontology and functional ontology. While the functional modeling framework is independent to any data representation infrastructure, XML has a synergy with the framework because of being able to handle semantics of the framework such as subject, object, function, etc. In addition to the semantic view point, XML also has flexibility to compound a document from multiple information fragments, so that it allows FDT to adapt to any application of manufacturing tasks. From those view point, we created OntoGear which is the foundation system that supports a designer or developer to author, share, and use FDT by using xfy technology that JustSystems, Corp. has developed as an XML application development framework.