CAPTURING, SHARING, AND DISCOVERING PRODUCT DATA AT A SEMANTIC LEVEL - MOVING FORWARD TO THE SEMANTIC WEB FOR ADVANCING THE ENGINEERING PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS By LIJUAN ZHU A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering August 2011 © Copyright by LIJUAN ZHU, 2011 All Right Reserved To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of LIJUAN ZHU find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. _______________________________________________________________ Uma Jayaram, Ph.D., Chair _______________________________________________________________ Sankar Jayaram, Ph.D. _______________________________________________________________ Hakan Gurocak, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to give special thanks to my parents, their love and encouragement that enabled me to achieve my goals. Thanks to my friends and fellow members in VRCIM Laboratory I’ve worked with: Okjoon, Vinay, Nathan, Panni and Pei. Finally, special and sincere thanks to my committee, Dr. Uma Jayaram, Dr. Sankar Jayaram, Dr. Hakan Gurocak and Dr.Jitesh Panchal, whose mentoring, wisdom, and friendship have been gratefully received and I will be benefitted with them for all of my life. iii CAPTURING, SHARING, AND DISCOVERING PRODUCT DATA AT A SEMANTIC LEVEL - MOVING FORWARD TO THE SEMANTIC WEB FOR ADVANCING THE ENGINEERING PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS Abstract By Lijuan Zhu, PhD Washington State University August 2011 Chair: Uma Jayaram Along with the greater productivity that CAD automation provides nowadays, the product data of engineering applications needs to be shared and managed efficiently to gain a competitive edge for the engineering product design. However, exchanging and sharing the heterogeneous product data is still challenging. This dissertation first presents a detailed exploration on semantic strategies based on ontology models for integrating product data between multiple engineering applications, including two typical CAD applications in Product Design Domain, and one CAE application in Assembly Simulation Domain. It is concluded that the semantic approach is superior for exchanging and sharing heterogeneous product data at a semantic level. Further, this dissertation postulates an approach to introduce reasoning capability into the engineering ontologies in product assembly domain to truly exploit this logic- based and formal representation for product data. A layered architecture for semantic applications containing reasoning units is proposed. Retrieval specifications and inference rules in SWRL/SQWRL are defined in these reasoning units. It is concluded iv that the reasoning mechanism extends the semantic representation made possible through the ontology and holds promise for improving design knowledge understanding and discovery. Finally, based on research achievements on ontology modeling and reasoning, this dissertation presents an online Product Design Semantic Knowledge Management System (PD-SKMS) for presenting, querying/reasoning, and authoring/updating product data semantics by incorporating Semantic Web technologies. The Product Semantic Repositories (PSR) in a Host Hybrid-Data Repository (HDR) preserves product data semantics for the product assembly domain. A Semantic Data Management Engine (SDME) provides querying/reasoning and authoring/updating services on PSRs. By linking to public linked data, the capability of PD-SKMS is extended to external data sources. It is concluded that the PD-SKMS delivers an interactive and knowledge- contextual design environment for the engineers on the Web and it greatly improves the traditional behaviors for exchanging and sharing product design knowledge. In summary, this dissertation proposes, discusses, and implements semantic approaches to support design activities for capturing, sharing, and discovering product data semantics in a knowledge-contextual environment. Several practical scenarios successfully demonstrate the proposed approaches and reveal the great potential of semantic approaches for advancing the traditional engineering product design process. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................... xiii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... xiv CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 CHAPTER TWO - PROBLEM STATEMENT, PROPOSED SOLUTION, AND SCOPE OF WORK ................................................................................................. 4 2.1 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM ........................................................................ 4 2.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION ................................................................................... 6 2.3 SCOPE OF RESEARCH ................................................................................... 6 2.4 OVERVIEW OF THE DISSERTATION ......................................................... 8 CHAPTER THREE - SEMANTIC INTEGRATION OF CAD/CAE APPLICATIONS BASED ON ONTOLOGY MODELING: STRATEGIES AND COMPARISONS ................................................................................................... 10 ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. 10 1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION ......................................................... 10 2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND BACKGROUND .......................................... 13 2.1 PRODUCT DATA REPRESENTATION FOR INTEGRATION FRAMEWORK OF ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS ..................................................................................................................................13 2.2 CONVENTIONAL DATA TRANSFER APPROACHES .........................................................................14 vi 2.3 OVERVIEW OF ONTOLOGY MODELING FOR ENGINEERING DOMAINS ...........................................15 3. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES .............................................................................. 17 4. ONTOLOGY MODELING FOR KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION .... 18 4.1 FUNDAMENTAL LAYERED STRUCTURE OF ENGINEERING ONTOLOGY .........................................19 4.1.1 Modeling of General Domain Ontology (GDO) .................................................................20 4.1.2 Modeling of Domain Specific Ontology (DSO) ...................................................................21 4.1.3 Modeling of Application Specific Ontology (ASO) .............................................................22 4.2 DISCUSSION ON LAYERED STRUCTURE OF ENGINEERING ONTOLOGY .........................................26 5. ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN STRATEGIES FOR INTEGRATION OF CAD/CAE APPLICATIONS ................................................................................. 27 5.1 EXTRACT DATA FROM SOURCE CAD/CAE APPLICATION AND INSTANTIATE KNOWLEDGE LAYER OF SOURCE ASO ..............................................................................................................................28 5.1.1 Test Case: Extract Product Data from PRO/E and Instantiate PRO-AO ...........................29 5.2 TRANSFER PRODUCT DATA SEMANTICS FROM SOURCE APPLICATION TO TARGET APPLICATIONS .........................................................................................................................................................31 5.2.1 Test Case 1: Integrate CAD Applications (PRO/E and CATIA) within One Domain (Product Design Domain) ............................................................................................................33 5.2.2 Test Case 2: Integrate Applications across Two Domains (PRO/E in Product Design Domain and VADE Assembly Simulation Domain) .....................................................................39 5.3 DISCUSSION ON ONTOLOGY -DRIVEN STRATEGY FOR CAD/CAE INTEGRATION .........................41 6. COMPARISON STUDIES BETWEEN ONTOLOGY AND OTHER TECHNOLOGIES .................................................................................................. 43 6.1 COMPARISON BETWEEN ONTOLOGY KNOWLEDGE MODELING AND UML MODELING ................43 6.2 COMPARISON BETWEEN ONTOLOGY -DRIVEN DATA TRANSFER APPROACH WITH TRADITIONAL PRO /VADE ......................................................................................................................................45 vii 7. SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK ................................................................ 47 8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................... 48 GLOSSARY OF TERMS ....................................................................................... 49 REFERENCE .......................................................................................................... 49 CHAPTER FOUR - SEMANTIC APPLICATIONS ENABLING REASONING IN PRODUCT ASSEMBLY ONTOLOGIES - MOVING PAST MODELING ....... 55 ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. 55 1. INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................