In this paper we present a formal characterization of the engineering concepts of behavior and function of technical artifacts. We capture the meanings that engineers attach to these concepts by formalizing, within the formal ontology DOLCE, the five meanings of artifact behavior and the two meanings of function that Chandrasekaran and Josephson identified in 2000 within the functional representation approach. We begin our formalization by reserving the term “behavior” of a technical artifact as “the specific way in which the artifact occurs in an event.” This general notion is characterized formally, and used to provide definitions of actual behaviors of artifacts, and the physically possible and physically impossible behaviors that rational agents believe that artifacts have. We also define several other notions, for example, input and output behaviors of artifacts, and then show that these ontologically characterized concepts give a general framework in which Chandrasekaran and Josephson's meanings of behavior can be explicitly formalized. Finally we show how Chandrasekaran and Josephson's two meanings of artifact functions, namely, device-centric and environment-centric functions, can be captured in DOLCE via the concepts of behavioral constraint and mode of deployment of an artifact. A more general goal of this work is to show that foundational ontologies are suited to the engineering domain: they can facilitate information sharing and exchange in the various engineering domains by providing concept structures and clarifications that make explicit and precise important engineering notions. The meanings of the terms “behavior” and “function” in domains like designing, redesigning, reverse engineering, product architecture, and engineering knowledge bases are often ambiguous or overloaded. Our results show that foundational ontologies can accommodate the variety of denotations these terms have and can explain their relationships.

Teleological modeling is fundamental to understanding and explaining many complex systems, especially engineered systems. Research on engineering design and problem solving has developed several ontologies for expressing teleology, for example, functional representation, function–behavior–structure, and structure–behavior–function (SBF). In this paper, we view SBF as a programming language. SBF models of engineering systems have been used in several computer programs for automated design and problem solving. The SBF language captures the expressive power of the earlier programs and provides a basis for interactive construction of SBF models. We provide a precise specification of the SBF language. We also describe an interactive model construction tool called SBFAuthor.

When engineering content is created and applied during the product life cycle, it is often stored and forgotten. Current information retrieval approaches based on statistical methods and keyword matching are not effective in understanding the context of engineering content. They are not designed to be directly applicable to the engineering domain. Therefore, engineers have very limited means to harness and reuse past designs. The overall objective of our research is to develop an engineering ontology (EO)-based computational framework to structure unstructured engineering documents and achieve more effective information retrieval. This paper focuses on the method and process to acquire and validate the EO. The main contributions include a new, systematic, and more structured ontology development method assisted by a semiautomatic acquisition tool. This tool is integrated with Protégé ontology editing environment; an engineering lexicon (EL) that represents the associated lexical knowledge of the EO to bridge the gap between the concept space of the ontology and the word space of engineering documents and queries; the first large-scale EO and EL acquired from established knowledge resources for engineering information retrieval; and a comprehensive validation strategy and its implementations to justify the quality of the acquired EO. A search system based on the EO and EL has been developed and tested. The retrieval performance test further justifies the effectiveness of the EO and EL as well as the ontology development method.

This paper presents the development and application of a software tool for modeling knowledge to be used in knowledge-based systems or the Semantic Web. The inferential modeling technique, which is a technique for modeling the static and dynamic knowledge elements of a problem domain, provided the basis for the tool. A survey of existing knowledge modeling tools revealed they typically failed to provide support in four main areas: support for an ontological engineering methodology or technique, support for dynamic knowledge modeling, support for dynamic knowledge testing, and support for ontology management. Dyna, a Protégé plug-in, has been developed, which supports the Inferential Modeling Technique, dynamic knowledge modeling, and dynamic knowledge testing. Protégé and Dyna are applied for constructing an ontological model in the domain of selecting a remediation technology for petroleum contaminated sites. Dynamic knowledge testing in Dyna enabled creation of a more complete knowledge model.

This paper presents our research on developing an ontology-based framework that can represent morphological characteristics related to assembly joints. Joints within the physical structure of an assembly are inevitable because of the limitations of component geometries and the associated, required engineering properties. Consequently, a framework is needed that can capture and propagate assembly design and joint information in a robust assembly model throughout the entire product development processes. The framework and model are based on an understanding of the morphological characteristics of an assembly and its different physical effects. The morphological characteristics are consequences of the principal physical processes and of the design intentions. Therefore, the morphological characteristics should be carefully represented while considering the geometry and topology of assembly joints. In this research, assembly joint topology is defined by a mereotopology, which is a region-based theory for the parts and associated concepts. This formal ontology can differentiate often ambiguous assembly and joining relations. Furthermore, the mereotopological definitions for assembly joints are implemented in Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules and Web Ontology Language triples. This process provides universality to the mereotopological definitions. Two geometrically and topologically similar joint pairs are presented to describe how the assembly joints can be defined in mereotopology and be transformed into SWRL rules. Web3D is also employed to support network-enabled sharing of assembly geometry. Finally, the proposed modeling framework is demonstrated using a real fixture assembly. This case study demonstrates the usability of the proposed framework for network-based design collaboration.

Ontologies have been successfully applied as a semantic enabler of communication between both users and applications in fragmented, heterogeneous multinational business environments. In this paper we discuss the underlying principles, their current implementation status, and most importantly, their applicability to problems in the building information modeling domain. We introduce the development of an ontology for the building and construction sector based on the industry foundation classes. We discuss several approaches of lifting modeling information that is based on the express family of languages for data modeling onto a logically rigid and semantically enhanced ontological level encoded in the W3C Ontology Web Language. We exemplify the added value of such formal notation of building models by providing several examples where generic query and reasoning algorithms can be applied to problems that otherwise have to be manually hard-wired into applications for processing building information. Furthermore, we show how the underlying resource description framework and the set of technologies evolving around it can be tailored to the need of distributed collaborative work in the building and construction industry.