1,721,022 research outputs found
Technical Report: Integrated Products and Services. Knowledge Desktop: Evaluation of Demonstrator 3c (Designers)
No full textThe principle objective of Work Package 1 within the IPAS project has been to develop a system to support the engineering designer, so that when during the design or redesign process for a particular part, relevant information about how it, and related parts, have performed in service, should be available in an assessable form. This report details the results from the evaluation of Demonstrator 3c, conducted at Rolls-Royce Derby between 20 and 24 August 2008. While the evaluation had to be curtailed in certain respects the results were highly positive and validate the approach taken over the IPAS project, in particular Demonstrator 3a, b and c. The evaluation also identified a number of shortcoming with respect to the construction and presentation of the knowledge held in the document repository
Searching and ranking ontologies on the Semantic Web
Full text linkThe number of ontologies available online is increasing constantly. Tools that are capable of searching, retrieving, and ranking ontologies are becoming crucial to facilitate ontology search and reuse. In this document, we describe OntoSearch, which is a tool for capturing and searching ontologies on the Semantic web. We also briefly describe AKTiveRank which is used to rank OWL ontologies based on certain ontology-structure analysis.
The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: a case study from the aero industry
No full textThe Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). The evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. Further, we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “application conditions”. We show that an explicit representation of application conditions, in a machine interpretable format, along with the constraints and the domain ontology can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints
Constraint capture and maintenance in engineering design
Full text linkThe Designers' Workbench is a system, developed by the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) consortium to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, to ensure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company's design rule book(s). In the principal application discussed here, the evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Design rules are expressed as constraints over the domain ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench's knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a system, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. Further we hypothesize that in order to appropriately apply, maintain and reuse constraints, it is necessary to understand the underlying assumptions and context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to them as “application conditions” and these form a part of the rationale associated with the constraint. We propose a methodology to capture the application conditions associated with a constraint and demonstrate that an explicit representation (machine interpretable format) of application conditions (rationales) together with the corresponding constraints and the domain ontology can be used by a machine to support maintenance of constraints. Support for the maintenance of constraints includes detecting inconsistencies, subsumption, redundancy, fusion between constraints and suggesting appropriate refinements. The proposed methodology provides immediate benefits to the designers and hence should encourage them to input the application conditions (rationales)
An information system to support the engineering designer
No full textEngineering companies are currently shifting their focus from selling products to providing services, hence the products’ designers must increasingly consider life-cycle requirements, in addition to conventional design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must consider knowledge throughout the life cycle of similar or related products. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a company’s operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents generated during the design and operation of a product makes it impractical to manually review all documents thoroughly during a task. As a case study, this paper discusses the concept and development of a large hypermedia based Knowledge Desktop that has been developed to support the maintenance and future design of aircraft engines. As part of the development cycle, the performance of the software and its acceptance by the user community has been fully evaluated. The evaluation method considered in this paper focuses on the subjective opinion of the users and measures the ease with which users could retrieve the information required to perform specific tasks
The Designers' Workbench: Using Ontologies and Constraints for Configuration.
No full textTypically, complex engineering artifacts are designed by teams who may not all be located in the same building or even city. Additionally, besides having to design a part of an artifact to be consistent with the specification, it must also be consistent with the company's design standards. The Designers' Workbench supports designers by checking that their configurations satisfy both physical and organisational constraints. The system uses an ontology to describe the available elements in a configuration task. Configurations are composed of features, which can be geometric or nongeometric, physical or abstract. Designers can select a class of feature (e.g. Bolt) from the ontology, and add an instance of that class (e.g. a particular bolt) to their configuration. Properties of the instance can express the parameters of the feature (e.g. the size of the bolt), and also describe connections to other features (e.g. what parts the bolt is used to hold together)
The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge : A case study from the aero industry
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ConEditor: Tool to Input and Maintain Constraints
No full textWe present a tool which helps domain experts capture and maintain constraints. The tool displays parts of an ontology (as classes, sub-classes and properties) in the form of a tree. A number of keywords and operators from a constraint language are also listed. The tool helps a user to create a constraint expression. Additionally, the tool has a facility which allows the user to input tabular data. The expressed constraints can be converted into a standard format, making them portable. It is planned to integrate this tool, ConEditor, with Designers’ Workbench, a system that supports human designers
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