Enhancement of CAD Model Interoperability Based on Feature Ontology

As the networks connect the world, enterprises tend to move manufacturing activities into virtual spaces. Since different software applications use different data terminology, it becomes a problem to interoperate, interchange, and manage electronic data among heterogeneous systems. It is said that approximately one billion dollar has been being spent yearly in USA for product data exchange and interoperability. As commercial CAD systems have brought in the concept of design feature for the sake of interoperability, terminologies of design features need to be harmonized. In order to define design feature terminology for integration, knowledge about feature definitions of different CAD systems should be considered. STEP standard have attempted to solve this problem, but it defines only syntactic data representation so that semantic data integration is not possible. This paper proposes a methodology for integrating modeling features of CAD systems. We utilize the ontology concept to build a data model of design features which can be a semantic standard of feature definitions of CAD systems. Using feature ontology, we implement an integrated virtual database and a simple system which searches and edits design features in a semantic way.