Shape Knowledge Annotation for Virtual Product Sharing and Reuse

This paper explores a promising framework, the ShapeAnnotator, for the semantic annotation of 3D objects in the context of Product Design. The ShapeAnnotator provides the functionalities that allow the user to load a suitable formalization of relevant concepts and to annotate, or tag, a virtual product model, or its parts, with these concepts (markup). Moreover, the ShapeAnnotator provides tools that support the users in the identification and selection of the relevant parts in the virtual product model (segmentation toolbox). An ad hoc form feature ontology has been developed and a specific application scenario has been set up for the validation of the approach in the reverse engineering scenario. Through the ShapeAnnotator, objects can be described by semantic annotations and also its meaningful features can be explicitly described independently and further characterized by specific attributes and relations with other parts and/or features. The contextualization of the ShapeAnnotator for Product Design is the first step towards the integration of knowledge formalization and geometric reasoning techniques, which will support the interoperability in the Product Development Process.