Current Issues in Multiple Domain Semantic Reconciliation for Ontology-Driven Interoperability in Product Design and Manufacture

The competitive environment in which the manufacturing industries are inserted ensures that to achieve competitiveness the businesses must react quickly to change and understand the balance of possible options when making complex decisions. For a high quality, timely decision across a range of complex factors, it is necessary high-quality information and knowledge available at the time of the decision making. However, each business sector requires its own view on the enterprises information it needs. This represents a problem as current software solution provide local support but do not provide trans-disciplinary interoperability that is critical to long term competitiveness. The exploration of semantic technologies has the potential to solve this problem using formalizations to share the knowledge across multi-domain environments, these systems can provide more comprehensive solutions than the approaches employed to date. The aim of this paper is to study the current issues regarding the application of ontology-driven interoperability for Product Development and Manufacture. This objective will be achieved through a literature review on Semantic Interoperability, Semantic Rules and Multiple Domains and a Discussion on the current issues of each topic. This research showed that the knowledge enrichment introduced by knowledge translation models aids the creation of an interoperable environment between the product design and its manufacture.