Ontology for Supplier Discovery in Manufacturing Domain

Abstract

Discovering the suppliers capable of manufacturing the parts that satisfy buyer requirements via current online market places remains difficult due to semantic differences between what the suppliers can produce and what the buyer wants to acquire. One of the promising approaches to overcome the semantic difference is to adopt an ontology to describe the suppliers' manufacturing capabilities and the buyer requirements that range widely from manufacturing costs to eco-friendly design. Such an ontology dedicated to supplier discovery has yet to be developed. MSDL(Manufacturing Service Description Language) provides the basis for defining terms and their relationships in the ontology. Thus, the objective of this paper is to extend MSDL into a new ontology suitable for supplier discovery in mold manufacturing industry. In addition, a new ontology development method for supplier discovery will be proposed. Finally prototype demonstrations are provided to show a feasibility of the proposed ontology in mold manufacturing domains.