Semantic Knowledge Management to Support Sustainable Product Design

Building upon the perspective of integrating knowledge management, ontology engineering and sustainable product technologies, the paper argues that formalization of sustainable design knowledge in ontology and semantic knowledge markup would allow efficient and effective semantic knowledge sharing in sustainable product design. Towards this end, two mechanisms are proposed: for ontology modeling to formalize design knowledge and for ontology implementation in sustainable design systems to facilitate semantic knowledge sharing across multidisciplinary teams and applications. A use scenario is demonstrated in the paper to validate these mechanisms.