INFORMATION ORGANISATION IN DESIGN: AN APPLICATION OF FORMAL ONTOLOGIES

Design activities need to be satisfied by several context considerations. The design data, information and knowledge need to be understood and interpreted by multiple context applications. Therefore, the organisation of those information and knowledge must be managed in a manner that all participants of design activities understand and share the actual meanings of the terms. An important approach onto design activities is to decompose the design activity into a set of processes, each of them being inter-related and sharing and exchanging information. Ontologies are potentially very powerful tools to share information and knowledge among systems. A number of different definitions are available for the word « ontology », but all of them highlight the basic functionality of an ontology as a methodology for enabling a better sharing of the meaning of terms. In this paper, we propose two approaches based on formal ontologies, thus enabling a better organisation of the information handled during the design process: the first one makes use of the PSL (Process Specification Language) as a key-enabler for process based communications and information exchanges. The other one proposes methods and tools facilitating communications through model based transformation (MDA) approaches