A product design ontology for enhancing shape processing in design workflows

Effective and efficient information management and knowledge sharing has become an essential part of more and more professional tasks in the Product Development Process. Among the various Knowledge Management technologies, ontologies offer new possibilities for representing, handling and retrieving product related knowledge, and for online collaboration. We conceived a Product Design Ontology (PDO) which especially addresses researchers in industrial product design and engineering analysis who need to share shape data and to develop software tools. In particular, we formalised the task-specific information associated to a shape, and the functionality and usage of shape processing methods in specific tasks of the design workflow. The PDO, thanks to the ontology-driven metadata on shapes and tools, may be also useful in industry on the one hand for training and for retrieving shape-related information, on the other hand for supporting benchmarking of processing tools and gathering the knowledge about shape processing workflows.