Using ontologies to support decentral product development processes

Adaptive and open platforms for cross-organizational collaborative product development (CPD) need flexible architectures and network solutions as well as novel data integration concepts supporting distributed, decentralized collaboration. Previous approaches to solving this problem have largely ignored the requirement of providing interoperable formats for product model data that enable the support of collaborative product development activities. This paper proposes the use of ontology technology to address this problem; it presents the integration of ontology technology into existing model-driven approaches to product development, and evaluates the applicability of the approach by describing a use case with limited CPD platform functionality.