Conceptual principles and ontology for a KBE implementation in inspection planning

The inspection process planning with coordinate measuring machines involves repetitive and well-known decisions to make about the different strategies to use, although much of this knowledge is today implicit in the expert mind. Therefore, the inspection planning is a good activity for implementing knowledge-based engineering (KBE) systems. However, the origin of KBE is in the design activity and, traditionally, the different methodologies have been applied to that activity. In this paper, the focus is the application of a known methodology traditionally used in the design process to the inspection process with coordinate measuring machines. The paper considers the knowledge elicitation phase, that is, the knowledge identification before its formalisation and implementation in a platform. The identification of knowledge is done in a high-abstraction level using a combination of IDEF0 diagrams and a text analysis application. The knowledge extracted was represented in a first approximation by means of a modified ontology to adapt the original MOKA ontology to the inspection process.