A Generic Ontology for Product Structuring

Product development requires certain activities which are based on reasoning, logic, structure, etc. and which is using large quantities of knowledge. Transiting successive well-defined stages is transforming market requirements into products or merchantable services. New product development requires the creation and evaluation of product development strategy, the organization and product concept generation, designing, testing and validation of product design, its manufacture, marketing and ensuring the product warranty and post-warranty service. The interest of an ontological approach is now well documented in the literature, especially related to clarifying, formalizing and standardizing the conceptual entities within a domain of discourse. The work presented here aims at designing a generic ontological model of the product structuring models’ domain, suitable to be easily extended to cover the many sub-domains of PD, thus facilitating the design of such application ontologies in the future, and their implementation in CAx platforms and data management systems.