Knowledge Based Methodology Supporting Interoperability Increase in Manufacture Domain

The formation of cooperation and collaboration alliances between several small organizations is proving, in multiple cases, to be more efficient and competitive by comparison with big companies. Manufacturing processes span nowadays across borders as result of the globalization markets pressure, thus research on manufacturing management has turned from an intra-enterprise to an inter-enterprise focus. Consequently there is a growing interest in electronic business (e-business) solutions to facilitate information sharing between organizations in the supply chain. However, due to the worldwide diversity of communities, a high number of knowledge representation elements, such as ontologies, which are not semantically coincident, have appeared representing the same segment of reality. Even operating in the same domain, enterprises do not understand each other, making the communication among various systems parties more difficult and sometimes impracticable. As a result there is a demand for intelligent solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations between enterprises, which needs to be able to manage its maintenance dynamically. Authors propose the increase of Interoperability in the mechanical manufacturing domain by the use of a knowledge–based methodology able to build a reference ontology and to provide its maintenance through the system user’s feedback.