An Application Ontology for Furniture Packaging Design

This article reports a case study about the development of an ontology used not only to organize the packaging design process of a firm, but also to explicitly express useful business rules in the domain of furniture packaging design. In the presented case, as the firm organized the projects manually, a "classical" building methodology was applied. The term "classical" refers to the main source of information for knowledge acquisition: the domain experts. A discussion about the ontology development process and the benefits of applying this formal ontology in a cluster of furniture maker companies is presented.