Ontogies

An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for the Metal Industry
Sheng-Tun Li
Department of Information Management, National Kaohsiung First University of Science Technology 
2 Juoyue Rd. Nantz District, Kaohsiung 811, Taiwan, R.O.C.
+886-7-6011000 ext 4111
stli@ccms.nkfust.edu.tw
Huang-Chih Hsieh
Department of Information Management, National Kaohsiung First University of ScienceTechnology
2 Juoyue Rd. Nantz District, Kaohsiung 811, Taiwan, R.O.C.
+886-7-6011000 ext 4111
jack@ai.nkfust.edu.tw
I-Wei Sun
Metal Industries Research & Development Center
1001 Kaonan Highway, Nantz District, Kaohsiung, 811, Taiwan, R.O.C.
+886-7-3513121 ext 2360
edward@mirdc.org.tw

ABSTRACT
Determining definite and consistent measurement and computation of materials and operations isof great importance for the operation procedures in metal industry. The effectiveness and efficiency of such decisions are greatly dependent on the domain understanding and empirical experience of engineers. The complexity and diversity of domain knowledge and terminology is the major hurdle for a successful operation procedure. Fortunately, such hurdles can be overcome by the emerging ontologytechnology. The establishment of ontology is usually the first step towards knowledge management. In this paper, we introduce a three-stage life cycle for ontology design and apply it to a real case with Taiwan¡¦s metal industry. The resulting ontology is represented as information ontology and domain ontology. To facilitate the knowledge management in the industry, we develop an ontology-basedknowledge management system with the KAON API environment. The proposed system is built upon theJava J2EE distributed component environment and provides the capability of semantic match, and assists engineers in the activities of knowledge management. It facilitates the promotion of the industry from traditional to the so-called ¡§knowledge-driven¡¨ industry service. Furthermore, it is generic andapplicable to different domain applications.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
I.2.4 [ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE]: Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods ¡V Representation languages,Representations; D.2.12. [SOFTWARE ENGINEERING]: Interoperability - Distributed objects. H.4.2 [INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS]:Types of Systems ¡V Decision Support.
General Terms
Management, Documentation,Design, Languages
Keywords
Knowledge management system, ontology, KAON, metal industry, XML, Java EJB
1.      INTRODUCTION
Definite and consistent operation procedures play the key role in the metal industry in which measurement and computation of materials and operations are of great importance for the success or failure of a procedure. These measurements and computations such as measuringmaterial size, computing machine stress, and estimating manufacture frequency are usually formalized as mathematic models. In reality, each engineer has his (her) own favorite model in use, and models could be revised or adjusted to be more practical and precise according to different requests of engineers whereas adopting appropriate revise or adjustment is based on the tacit knowledge andempirical experience of engineers or the related knowledge documents they have on hand. However, with the diversity and complexity of conceptual terminology in the metal industry and the lack of proper document management, it is very difficult for engineers to locate the knowledge they need.
In the past few years, the emergence of knowledge management has facilitated the progress for the knowledgedemander in searching for knowledge efficiently and effectively [2, 22].The activity of knowledge management is wide and complex. It can be the management of individual knowledge or the operation of enterprise knowledge. It also includes activities that form the communication of tacit knowledge to the integration of explicit knowledge. In order to achieve the goal of knowledge management, ontology has...