A Web-Based Collaborative Environment Based on a Shared Ontology for the Maintenance of Steam Turbines

This paper describes the constituents, as well as, the general layout of a collaborative environment dedicated to the maintenance of steam turbines. The core component of the environment is a shared ontology of the domain. The developed ontology contains information on every component, its relationship with the upper and lower component class, as well as a list of previous failure symptoms and diagnostics. The environment is composed of a number of tools such as: a customized white board, chat, audio and video conferencing, FTP, shared workspace and the shared steam turbine ontology. The ontology is semi-automatically generated from the steam turbine components database via Protege ontology editor using the plugin DataGenie.