Title: Towards an ontology for product version management

Authors: María Soledad Sonzini; Marcela Vegetti; Horacio Leone

Addresses: INGAR – Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño (CP 3000), Avellaneda 3657, Province of Santa Fe, Argentina; Universidad Nacional de La Rioja (CP 5300), Luis M. de la Fuente S/N, Province of La Rioja, Argentina ' INGAR – Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño (CP 3000), Avellaneda 3657, Province of Santa Fe, Argentina ' INGAR – Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño (CP 3000), Avellaneda 3657, Province of Santa Fe, Argentina

Abstract: During its lifecycle, products are affected by market, technology, and user requirements. Without a process for efficiently handling product changes, product data, which is spread in different areas and systems, might become unusable, incomplete, or inconsistent. A simple change on product information may trigger a domino effect that could be very difficult to control. In order to reduce this effect, knowledge is important to answer what, when, why, and how a change occurred. This article proposes an ontology that allows capturing product changes in order to answer the aforementioned questions. The proposed ontology extends PRoductONTOlogy (PRONTO) (Vegetti et al., 2011) to represent product family changes. OWL implementation of the proposed ontology is presented with a simple case study to validate it.

Keywords: product lifecycle management; PLM; product version; product ontology; control version; engineering change management; ECM; product information; ontology web language; OWL; bill of materials; BOM; semantic web rule language; SWRL; product version management; product changes; product families.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPLM.2015.068008

International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, 2015 Vol.8 No.1, pp.80 - 97

Received: 07 Mar 2014
Accepted: 18 Jul 2014
Published online: 13 Mar 2015 *

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