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An Ontology-Based Approach to Manage Conflicts in Collaborative Design

Moisés Lima dutra [LIRIS]

11/2009

Établissement : Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

Soutenue le Nov 27, 2009

Jury
Pr Ouksel Aris, Université d'Illinois, USA	Rapporteur
Pr Gardan Yvon, Université de Reims, France	Rapporteur
Pr Ait Ameur Yamine, Université de Poitier, France	Président
Dr Feng Shaw, NIST, USA	Examinateur
Pr Gonçalves Ricardo, UNINOVA, Université New Lisbonne, Portugual	Co-directeur
Pr Ghodous Parisa, LIRIS, France	Directeur

Contact : ghodous@liris.cnrs.fr

Abstract

Abstract Today’s complex design projects require teams of designers to come together to facilitate the sharing of their respective expertise in order to produce effective design solutions. Due to the increasing need for exchanging knowledge, modern design projects are more structured to work with distributed virtual teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve global optima in design. Nevertheless, in the collaborative design process, the integration of multidisciplinary virtual teams – involving exchange and sharing of knowledge and expertise – frequently generates a lot of conflicting situations. Different experts’ viewpoints and perspectives, in addition to several ways of communicating and collaborating at the knowledge level, make all this process very hard to tackle. In order to achieve an optimal scenario, some problems must firstly be solved, such as: requirement specification and formalization, ontology integration, and conflict detection and resolution. Specifying and formalizing the knowledge demands a great effort towards obtaining representation patterns that aggregate several disjoint knowledge areas. Each expert should express himself so that the others can understand his information correctly. It is necessary, therefore, to use a flexible and sufficiently extensive data representation model to accomplish such a task. Some current models fall short of providing an effective solution to effective knowledge sharing and collaboration on design projects, because they fail to combine the geographical, temporal, and functional design aspects with a flexible and heterogeneous knowledge representation model. This work proposes an architecture for collaborative design that intends to be synchronous, heterogeneous, service-oriented, agent-based, and ontology-based. Particular representation models are transformed into ontology instances and merged together in order to accomplish the final product design. It is a synchronous approach because the merging process is undertaken at the same time that the interaction among the designers takes place. It is heterogeneous because it provides the users with two approaches for ontology integration: the use of a generic ontology and the harmonization process. Our proposal focuses on collaborative design conflicts and makes use of Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Web Services, the former as a tool for knowledge representation and the latter as a technological support for communication.

publis — LIRIS