Design of product ontology architecture for collaborative enterprises

As enterprises are subject to cope with frequently changing business environment, enterprises should integrate value chains such as supply chain and design chain. Sharing product information must precede for the integration. However, because most of the participants have different business experience and business domains, interoperability of product information among enterprises should be guaranteed for collaboration. To achieve interoperability, we suggest product ontology architecture through the investigation of generic ontology architecture. We first suggest 4-layered ontology architecture for an integrated value chain. Extending this ontology architecture, we develop product ontology architecture which facilitates building product ontologies that are referred to all related participants inbound and outbound of the enterprise for collaboration. Using a product ontology, each enterprise can have semantic interoperability across each other for collaborative works. Because product ontologies have the feature of evolving through product lifecycle, the proposed product ontology architecture reflects this evolving feature to guarantee semantic interoperability.