(Wirtschaftsinformatik: Vol. 47, No. 4, 2005) Hahn, Axel
Product development is the most knowledge intensive business process in industry. Product models have a special role in supporting knowledge and information exchange. Interdisciplinary engineering processes and distributed tools generate distributed and heterogeneous product models with numerous internal dependencies and relationships. Neither Knowledge Management Systems nor Product Life Cycle Management Systems support the maintenance of these relationships sufficiently today. This paper suggests an approach to describe and manage internal relationships of the product model and to ensure its consistency by using Semantic Web technologies. Ontologies are applied to specify the relationships semantically.