How an ontology can infer knowledge to be used in product conceptual design

Abstract

Abstract:In the past years, great advances have been made in the development of ontologies applied to the field of engineering design, essentially in functional and structural models. OntoFaBeS is an ontology whose objective is to formalize the knowledge about a product in order to infer different structures of that product from functional requirements set by the user. Hence, an effective tool capable of assisting the designer in the rational design phase is created. OntoFaBeS does not only provide the product redesign, but also allows for the evaluation of the different design alternatives created. OntoFaBeS can also capture the knowledge obtained from queries. This knowledge may be represented later in a CAE system. In order to illustrate the operation of OntoFaBeS, a mechanical pencil is used as an application example. This allows for a thorough assessment of the ontology design, wherein a query proves the ontology's ability to infer knowledge.

The application of restructuring of knowledge in civil engineering

“…the outputs from the logic base) to the world-wideweb, necessitates arranging the knowledge into ontological structures. Ontologies are similar to taxonomies where entities are classified according to strict hierarchical protocols (Cebrian-Tarrason & Vidal 2008;Noy & McGuinness 2001). Ontologies have a wider content and additional characteristics to those of taxonomies (Verbeek 2018).…”

Function in engineering: Benchmarking representations and models

“…The most theoretical level of comparisons involves studying differences of “purpose,” “transformation,” or “intent” (Rosenman & Gero, 1998), which have been reduced to formal frameworks such as the function–behavior–structure (Gero & Kannengiesser, 2004). Such frameworks have been used to create defined representations for instantiating models, which are then coupled with reasoning activities, such as “model building” and “model using” for drawing inferences (Cebrian-Tarrason et al, 2008). Tools such as FunctionCAD (Nagel et al, 2009), 2nd-CAD (Vargas-Hernandez & Shah, 2004), function-behavior-state modeler (Umeda et al, 1996), design repository (Bohm et al, 2005), and ConMod (Sen et al, 2013 b ) have been used to support such model-building activities.…”

Methodology for Knowledge-Based Engineering Template Update

“…This can be achieved by defining an ontology of the domains. An ontology allows to represent concepts and relationships between these concepts [4] that can be used to both infer implicit knowledge and to check the consistency of the domain definition by resorting to an inference engine [5].…”