PLIB Ontology for Great Group Technology

Great Group Technology (GGT) is the combination of Group Technology and network technology. The core and basis of GGT is an open, across-industrial parts information exchange and integration platform. In this paper, we mainly discuss the realization of this platform. Firstly, the framework and working mechanism of this platform is introduced. Then the two core parts (web-based parts library and part search engine) of this platform are pointed out and analyzed. Through requirement analysis, we think PLIB ontology is fit for the solution of these requirements (unambiguous description, integration automatically, variant design in real time etc). Then a parts library information model is built. Because the function feature and structure feature is not included in PLIB ontology, an Extended PLIB Ontology library is built to solve this problem. The Extended PLIB ontology library is composed of two parts: PLIB ontology based on the PLIB standard and semantic feature ontology. At last, the realization method and farther work are introduced. Now, the prototype system has been tested in our lab.