A Reasoning Approach for Conflict Dealing in Collaborative Design
Résumé
In collaborative design process, multidisciplinary virtual teams' integration - involving exchange and sharing of knowledge and expertise - frequently generate a lot of conflicting situations. Different experts' point of views and perspectives, in addition to several ways of communicating and collaborating in knowledge level, make all this process very hard to tackle. Aiming to minimize the appearance of early design conflicts and to solve the rest of them, this paper presents an approach to represent knowledge in design process based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is structured to be a major formalism for the design and dissemination of ontology information. The use of OWL reasoning is intended to be a consistent way to verify the information given by several experts, trying to avoid redundancies, contradictions and misunderstoods. A prototype, based on the Function-Behavior-Structure design framework, that uses OWL to input data, was built up to validate this approach.