Product Ontology Construction from Engineering Documents

Ontology provides a base framework for knowledge representation, and the methodology of ontology construction is one of the most important research topics in the ontology community. There have been many methodologies proposed, and some of them have been along with constructing engineering ontology. However, the previous methodologies are mostly top-down approaches which do not maximize the benefits of bottom-up approaches. There are few bottom-up approaches, but they do not utilize the full resources of knowledge such as engineering documents. This study proposes the systematic methodology to develop the ontology in a bottom-up style from engineering documents, called DocOnto (document-based ontology). The methodology is mainly composed of three phases such as defining ontology for terms in engineering documents, integrating the ontology with semantic networks for both a single document and a focused document group, and pruning the ontology for practically usage. In this approach, first-order logic (FOL) and semantic networks (SN) are used for formal and visual representation of ontology, and semantic mapping with similarity evaluation is used in integrating ontology. This approach can be computerized for structured engineering documents. Through the methodology description, a comprehensive example is utilized to show the methodology in every detailed step.