Ontology Maintenance in a Hierarchical Federated Collaborative Product Development Environment

This paper presents a novel approach aiming to dynamically maintain the collaboration ontology in the execution of an ontology-based federated collaborative product development system when a federate joins or has resigned from a given federation. The proposed approach includes two algorithms: ontology maintenance (+) and ontology maintenance (-), corresponding to joining and resigning situations. It adopts an axiom-based deduction ontology fusion strategy, and takes heavyweighted ontologies into consideration. It can find all the explicit and derived inter-ontology relations, and furthermore it reaches the active upper bounds of implicit equivalent inter-ontology relations searching. This paper also discusses some implementation issues on the basis of TH_RTI, a RTI (Run Time Infrastructure) version developed by National CIMS ERC, Tsinghua University. The proposed approach has great potential to improve the efficiency of ontology-based federated collaboration executions, reduce the work load for adaptive adjustment of ever-existing platforms, and enhance the applicability and flexibility of collaborative product development systems.