Faceted search and retrieval based on semantically annotated product family ontology

Abstract

With the advent of various services and applications of Semantic Web, semantic annotation had emerged as an important research area. The use of semantically annotated ontology had been evident in numerous information processing and retrieval tasks. One of such tasks is utilizing the semantically annotated ontology in product design which is able to suggest many important applications that are critical to aid various design related tasks. However, ontology development in design engineering remains a time consuming and tedious task that demands tremendous human efforts. In the context of product family design, management of different product information that features efficient indexing, update, navigation, search and retrieval across product families is both desirable and challenging. This paper attempts to address this issue by proposing an information management and retrieval framework based on the semantically annotated product family ontology. Particularly, we propose a document profile (DP) model to suggest semantic tags for annotation purpose. Using a case study of digital camera families, we illustrate how the faceted search and retrieval of product information can be accomplished based on the semantically annotated camera family ontology. Lastly, we briefly discuss some further research and application in design decision support, e.g. commonality and variety, based on the semantically annotated product family ontology.

OGIR: an ontology‐based grid information retrieval framework

“…Many researchers have used ontologies in the field of information retrieval in order to build concept-based retrieval mechanisms (e.g. Ferrara et al, 2006;Corby et al, 2006;Nguyen and Phan, 2009;Lim et al, 2009). Semantic portals provide simple search functions that may be better characterised as semantic data retrieval, rather than semantic information retrieval (Castells et al, 2004).…”

A semantic file system for integrated product data management

“…Adopting the concept of semantically annotated ontology from Semantic Web applications to the field of computer-aided product design has shown to be very promising for design-related retrieval tasks. Therefore, research approaches for semantics-based engineering document analysis and retrieval as well as ontologies for Engineering Information Retrieval (EIR) are becoming more prominent [20,21].…”