An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for the Metal Industry

Determining definite and consistent measurement and computation of materials and operations is of great importance for the operation procedures in metal industry. The effectiveness and efficiency of such decisions are greatly dependent on the domain understanding and empirical experience of engineers. The complexity and diversity of domain knowledge and terminology is the major hurdle for a successful operation procedure. Fortunately, such hurdles can be overcome by the emerging ontology technology. The establishment of ontology is usually the first step towards knowledge management. In this paper, we introduce a three-stage life cycle for ontology design and apply it to a real case with Taiwan’s metal industry. The resulting ontology is represented as information ontology and domain ontology. To facilitate the knowledge management in the industry, we develop an ontology-based knowledge management system with the KAON API environment. The proposed system is built upon the Java J2EE distributed component environment and provides the capability of semantic match, and assists engineers in the activities of knowledge management. It facilitates the promotion of the industry from traditional to the so-called “knowledge-driven” industry service. Furthermore, it is generic and applicable to different domain applications.