TY  - JOUR
ID  - 20870264
AU  - Sun, Hongbo
AU  - Fan, Wenhui
AU  - Shen, Weiming
AU  - Xiao, Tianyuan
T1  - Ontology fusion in high-level-architecture-based collaborative engineering environments
T1  - Ontology fusion in HLA-based collaborative engineering environments
JO  - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems And Humans
PB  - IEEE
SP  - 1
EP  - 12
VL  - PP
IS  - 99
PY  - 2012
KW  - collaborative engineering environments (CEEs), high-level architecture (HLA), ontology, product development
N2  - In high-level-architecture (HLA)-based distributed heterogeneous collaborative engineering environments (CEEs), the construction of federation object model files is time consuming. This paper presents an ontology fusion approach aiming at establishing a common understanding in such collaborative environments. The proposed approach has three steps: ontology mapping, ontology alignment, and ontology merging. Ontology mapping employs a top-down approach to explore all bridge relations between two terms from different ontologies based on bridge axioms and deduction rules. Ontology alignment adopts a bottom-up approach to discover implicit bridge relations between two terms from different domain ontologies based on equivalent inference. Ontology merging generates a new collaboration ontology from discovered equivalent bridge relations. It adopts an axiom-based ontology fusion strategy and takes heavy-weighted ontologies into consideration. It can find all the explicit and derived interontology relations. In a typical CEE, the proposed approach has a great potential to improve the efficiency of preparation for HLA-based collaborative engineering processes, reduce the work load for adaptive adjustment of existing platforms, and enhance the reusability and flexibility of CEEs. A case study has been conducted to validate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
M1  - 53601
DO  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSMCA.2012.2190138
U3  - NRC Institute for Research in Construction
U3  - Institut de recherche en construction du CNRC (IRC-IRC)
U3  - National Research Council Canada
U3  - Conseil national de recherches Canada (CNRC-NRC)
SN  - 1083-4427
ER  -