Semantic product modelling and configuration:Challenges and opportunities

The European Semantic Web-based Open engineering Platform, project (SWOP 2008) is concerned with business innovation when specifying products to suit end-user’s requirements and objectives. This paper will show how Semantic Web (SW) technology of the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can be used to its fullest to model the products to be developed and configured. It introduces a Product Modelling Ontology (PMO) as the main result of SWOP. It is in essence a fully generic, freely reusable 'upper ontology' specified in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the most prominent SW technology (OWL 2008). PMO contains all necessary and sufficient modelling constructs to define any end-user product ontology, taking into account all relevant end-user's product classes, properties and relationships (in particular the predefined ‘specialization’ and ‘decomposition’ relationships) together with cardinalities, data types, units and default values. Rules in the form of 1) assertions that have to be satisfied and 2) derivations that can be executed add the more complex product knowledge aspects. PMO has already been applied in many end-user situations and other R&D projects