Faceted search and retrieval based on semantically annotated product family ontology

With the advent of various services and applications of Semantic Web, semantic annotation had emerged as an important research area. The use of semantically annotated ontology had been evident in numerous information processing and retrieval tasks. One of such tasks is utilizing the semantically annotated ontology in product design which is able to suggest many important applications that are critical to aid various design related tasks. However, ontology development in design engineering remains a time consuming and tedious task that demands tremendous human efforts. In the context of product family design, management of different product information that features efficient indexing, update, navigation, search and retrieval across product families is both desirable and challenging. This paper attempts to address this issue by proposing an information management and retrieval framework based on the semantically annotated product family ontology. Particularly, we propose a document profile (DP) model to s ggest semantic tags for annotation purpose. Using a case study of digital camera families, we illustrate how the faceted search and retrieval of product information can be accomplished based on the semantically annotated camera family ontology. Lastly, we briefly discuss some further research and application in design decision support, e.g. commonality and variety, based on the semantically annotated product family ontology.