Integrating the Mechanical Domain into Seed Approach

Data-driven technologies have found their way into all areas of engineering. In product development they can accelerate the customization to individualized requirements. Therefore, they need a database that exceeds common product data management systems. The creation of this database proves to be challenging because in addition to explicit standards and regulations the product design contains implicit knowledge of product developers. Hence, this paper presents an approach for the semantic integration of the engineering design (SeED). The goal is an automated design of an ontology, which represents the product design in detail.SeED fulfils two tasks. First, the ontology provides a machine-processable representation of the products design, which enables all kind of data-driven technologies. Among other representations, the ontology contains formal logics and semantics. Accordingly, it is a more comprehensible solution for product developers and knowledge engineers. Second, the detailed representation enables discovering of intrinsic knowledge, e.g. design patterns in product generations. Consequently, SeED is a novel approach for efficient semantic integration of the product design.