A functional concept ontology and its application to automatic identification of functional structures

✍ Scribed by Yoshinobu Kitamura; Toshinobu Sano; Kouji Namba; Riichiro Mizoguchi

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 837 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1474-0346
• DOI: 10.1016/s1474-0346(02)00006-x

✦ Synopsis

Functionality of artifacts as well as structure and behavior plays crucial roles in problem-solving such as design. This article discusses automatic identi®cations of functional structures of artifacts from given behavioral models of components and their connection information (called functional understanding). We propose a functional concept ontology which provides a rich vocabulary representing functions together with clear de®nitions grounded on behavior. The ontology enables the automatic identi®cation system to make the search in the functional space tractable and to screen out meaningless interpretations. Furthermore, the ontology includes a new category of functional concepts named meta-functions representing conceptual categories of interdependency between functions. It plays a crucial role in consolidation of functions to give criteria of grouping functions, that is, identity of consolidated functions. It enables the identi®cation system to generate such functional hierarchies that do not correspond to physical structure.