What are features? An ontology-based review of the literature

Feature-based product modeling is the leading approach for the integrated representation of engineering product data. On the one side, this approach has stimulated the development of formal models and vocabularies, data standards and computational ontologies. On the other side, the current ways to model features is considered problematic since it lacks a principled and uniform methodology for feature representation. This paper reviews the state of art of feature-based modeling approaches by concentrating on how features are conceptualised. It points out the drawbacks of current approaches and proposes an high-level ontology-based perspective to harmonize the definition of feature.