The frequent changes of market push companies to participate in the collaborative product development (CPC) environment, in which the companies need to exchange product information on the web. But, existing product data management (PDM) systems of the companies are likely to have been developed only for the use inside companies and therefore can not directly exchange the product information with the other systems. For exchanging information across the systems, we need to consider that the data models of the systems are different in three aspects – in their syntax, structure, or terms.

We propose ‘XML-based Ontology’ (XO) Mapper approach to overcome these three differences. Firstly, we adapt XML as a standard syntax in expressing the information. And we adopt DAML+OIL for ontology representation, since it is an expressive language that uses XML syntax. Secondly, we build an XML ontology that explicitly shows the structure of XML. And we also build product ontology that explicitly defines the concepts and relations of product information. We then provide a mapping between the XML ontology and product ontology, through which we can transform the structure of XML into explicit relations of concepts. Finally, the mapping between product ontologies of different domains is also provided for the information exchange without any semantic confusion. These two mappings will be realized using inference rules, thereby enabling computer systems to execute the information exchange automatically.

Key Words : CPC, PDM, product structure, semantic mapping, DAML+OIL, ontology.