We present an ontology of materials that has been developed in the context of the IMCOD ( Intelligent Manager for Comprehensive Design) project [BBK+92]. IMCOD (cf. figure 1) is primarily concerned with the problems arising from multidisciplinary design. In our scenario each of the disciplines is realized by an already existing software system---the local experts---, e.g. expert systems, databases, simulation software, etc. The systems are consulted by the design manager (also realized as a knowledge--based system) in order to provide their limited expertise for the overall product design.
One of the issues we are tackling is the development of an integrated product model for the design manager that is capable of representing the product at an appropriate abstraction level, i.e. serving as a decision aid for controlling the design process, allowing the generation of partial views for each of the local experts, and mapping the advice of the local experts onto the product model. Especially the latter issue requires a mapping of the conceptualization of the local experts to the conceptualization of the integrated product model or the definition of a common conceptualization that is shared by all agents. We adopt the notion of conceptualization from [GN87]: the basic set of objects that exist in a domain and the relationships among them. Ideally, such a conceptualization would be shared among the local experts and can also serve as a basis for the integrated product model. Knowledge sharing is meant in the sense of the Knowledge Sharing Effort [NFF+91]: Based on a common syntax and semantics of a representation language we define the common conceptualization explicitly.
