Product Development Process Ontology

The objective of the project is to develop an ontological framework to facilitate the sharing and comparison of methods, variables, and results with studies of product development processes. Many empirical studies are used solely within the research group, which has conducted the study, and often, comparisons with other studies are based on frail foundations. The major limiting factor in generalizing methods and results has been the absence of a unifying set of variables relating one study to another. We postulate that an ontological system for identifying and classifying variables can alleviate these difficulties. Ontology can be defined as the specification of a conceptualization. That is, ontology is a description (like the formal specification of a program) of the objects, concepts, entities, and relationships that can exist in some area of interest. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified representation of the area of interest. In our context, ontology becomes a specification medium accessed by researchers for making ontological commitments. The goal is to communicate consistently in a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. In order to assure easy access to the ontological structure, it is pertinent to implement the evolving system as a World Wide Web application. Our assumption here is that if the ontology is made easily accessible, accumulation of methods and findings will take place rapidly through contributions from research groups and individual researchers, and the ontology will evolve over time External partners: Stanford University: Larry Leifer, Ozgur Eris, Ade Mabogunje. (Poul Kyvsgaard Hansen)