OntoSTEP: Enriching product model data using ontologies

The representation and management of product lifecycle information is critical to any manufacturing organization. Different modeling languages are used at different lifecycle stages, for example STEP's EXPRESS may be used at a detailed design stage, while UML may be used for initial design stages. It is necessary to consolidate product information created using these different languages to build a coherent knowledge base. In this paper, we present an approach to enable the translation of STEP schema and its instances to Ontology Web Language (OWL). This gives a model-which we call OntoSTEP-that can easily be integrated with any OWL ontologies to create a semantically rich model. As an examp…