Ontology fusion in HLA-based collaborative product development

This paper presents a novel ontology fusion approach which aims to establish a mutual understanding among HLA (High Level Architecture) -based distributed heterogeneous collaborative product development systems. The approach includes three steps: ontology mapping, ontology alignment and ontology merging. It adopts an axiom-based deduction ontology fusion strategy, and takes heavy weighted ontologies into consideration. It can find all the explicit and derived inter-ontology relations, and furthermore it reaches the active upper bounds of implicit equivalent inter-ontology relations searching. The proposed approach has great potential to improve the efficiency of preparation for HLA-based collaborative product development, reduce the work load for adaptive adjustment of ever-existing platforms, and enhance the applicability and flexibility of collaborative development systems.