Ontology has been known as an important means to represent design knowledge in product development, however, most ontology creation has not yet been systematically carried out. Port, as the location of intended interaction between a component and its enviornment, plays an important role in product conceptual design. It constitutes the interface of a component and defines its boundary. This paper introduces an approach, it is convenient to abstractly represent the intended exchange of signals, energy and/or material, and creat and manage port-based domain ontology, to port-based ontology modeling (PBOM) for product conceptual design. In this paper, port concept and port functional description through using natural language are first presented and their semantic synthesis is used to describe port ontology. Secondly, an ontology repository which contains the assorted primitive concepts and primitive knowledge to map the component connections and interactions is built. Meanwhile a model of port-based multi-views which contains functional view, behavior view and configuration view is articulated, and the attributes and taxonomy of ports in a hierarchy are presented. Next, a port-based ontology language (PBOL) is described to represent the process of port ontology refinement, and a port-based FBS modeling framework is constructed to describe system configuration. Furthermore, a formal knowledge framework to manage comprehensive knowledge is proposed, which could help designers create, edit, organize, represent and visualize product knowledge. Finally, a revised tape case is employed to validate the efficiency of the port ontology for product conceptual design and illustrate its application.

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