Using ontologies for the Integrated Product Model Development

An Integrated Product Model (IPM) stands for a conceptual model describing data of a technical product. It is used as basic technology of enabling application systems to exchange and share product data. Within the IPM development, the integration of data models is an important process. Unfortunately, because of the model complexity, it is difficult for the IPM developer to have control of it. This paper presents a methodical approach which is specifically designed to support the IPM developer in his integration work and to get over the complexity problem. The approach is based on ontology engineering mechanisms. Introduction and background An Integrated Product Model (IPM) stands for a conceptual model describing data of a technical product. It is specifically designed to enable application systems to exchange and share product data in such a way that no structural transformations are necessary whenever product data are processed in any application context in which they were not generated. It is therefore an essential requirement for IPM to describe data in a semantically consistent and coherent form. The IPM of ISO 10303, a development of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and also known under the acronym STEP, may be viewed as the world-wide most important one [ISO 1994a]. STEP is an International Standard and organised as a series of parts. At present, the number of STEP parts is continuously growing, and the most of already existing STEP parts are still under development. An end of the STEP development is not yet in sight. STEP’s initial release, i.e. the first publication of its standardised parts, appeared in 1994. Apart from the development of STEP, there have been many other IPM development efforts, whether at international or national level, whether in research institutions, in standardisation committees or in individual enterprises. Important representative IPM development projects have been within Europe the ESPRIT projects IMPPACT (Integrated Modelling of Products and Processes using Advanced Computer Technology, project no. 2165) [Gielingh & Suhm 1992] and MARITIME (Modelling And Reuse of Information over Time, project no. 6041) [Lehne & Mehta 1995] (ESPRIT is an acronym for European Specific Program for Research and Development in Information Technology), within Germany the BMBF and DFG projects ’Qualit[itssicherung durch CIM’ [Anderl & Polly 1995] and the ’Sonderforschungsbereich 346’ (SFB346) [Grabowski, Meis & Hain 1995] (BMBF is an acronym for ’Bundesministerium fiir Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie’, and DFG for ’Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’), for example. Although all these approaches are different with respect to IPM content and IPM development methodology, they are confronted with the same problem, the complexity of the IPM. The complexity of IPMs has mainly three critical