Due to the increasing need for knowledge exchanging, today’s complex design projects are even more structured to work with multidisciplinary virtual distributed teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve global optima in design. However, this integration – involving exchanging and sharing of knowledge and expertise – frequently generates a lot of conflicting situations. Different experts’ points of view, heterogeneity of backgrounds, cultural and social differences, different working methods, and even distinct time zones make this problem very hard to tackle.
This PhD thesis proposes an ontology-based approach to resolve collaborative design conflicts and to minimize their appearance in early-stage design. Such an approach uses Web Ontology Language (OWL) to represent knowledge and an inference engine to verify information coherence. A synchronously and heterogeneously collaborative platform is taken as support for testing and evaluating the proposed scenarios. First, this platform provides ontology representation for product models. Subsequently, these models are transformed into ontology instances and merged together in order to accomplish a final product design.