Semantic Interoperability Based on Ontology Mapping in Distributed Collaborative Design Environment

Abstract

With the increasing of global competition, it is important to make the product design process as fast and efficient as possible. One way to achieve improvements in efficiency and innovation is through better collaboration of designers working on a common design task and interacting in the design process, so that unnecessary backtracking and delays are avoided. In an integrated and concurrent design environment, designers interact and reach agreement by sharing common information. But it is not an easy task due to the heterogeneity of information resources. We have to solve semantic interoperability first in order to implement “cooperation” between different information systems. There are many legacy systems based on conflicting ontologies which hinder the communications among them and become the obstacle of software reuse and system interoperability. By analyzing relations between agents and ontologies, a semantic interoperability algorithm based on ontology mapping is proposed in the paper. And the DCDP framework presented here provides a software architecture for synchronous groupware applications to deal with heterogeneity. The framework’s main characteristic is data centricity. The users collaborate on and exchange data, and the data is dynamically transformed to adapt to the particular computing platform.