A Methodology for Creating Ontologies for Engineering Design

This paper describes a methodology for developing ontologies for engineering design. The methodology combines a number of methods from social science and computer science, together with taxonomies developed in the field of engineering design. A case study is used throughout the paper focusing upon the use of an ontology for searching, indexing and retrieving of engineering knowledge. An ontology for indexing design knowledge can assist the users to formulate their queries when searching for engineering design knowledge. The root concepts of the ontology were elicited from engineering designers during an empirical research study. These formed individual taxonomies within the ontology and were validated through indexing a set of ninety-two documents. Relationships between concepts are extracted as the ontology is populated with instances. The identified root concepts were found to be complete and sufficient for the purpose of indexing. A thesaurus and an automatic classification are being developed as a result of this evaluation. The methodology employed during the test case is presented in this paper. There are six separate stages, which are presented together with the research methods employed for each stage and the evaluation of each stage. The main contribution of this research is the development of a methodology to allow researchers and industry to create ontologies for their particular purpose and to develop a thesaurus for the terms within the ontology. The methodology is based upon empirical research and hence, focuses upon understanding a user’s domain models as opposed to extracting an ontology from documentation.Copyright © 2005 by ASME