An Approach to Semantic Interoperability for Product Development Through Automatic Requirement Extraction and Semantic Reconciliation

Abstract

The strong competitiveness challenges manufacturing industry to rationalize different ways of bringing new products to the market in the shortest time with competitive prices while ensuring higher quality. Industries need to effectively share product requirements, which comes from various sources and are heterogeneous in nature, during the Product Development Process (PDP) to stay competitive. However, problems with misinterpretation of such requirements have been identified during its sharing due to semantic interoperability obstacles related to the process of automatically gathering requirements and their translation and reuse. This research proposes an approach to automatically gather product requirements, extracting its knowledge and translate it for further use and reuse along PDP. The research structure consisted of firstly studying the current issues of the topic, secondly by exploring an approach, to be validated in an experimental case. Current issues point out to gaps related to the process of semantic reconciliation and knowledge extraction perspectives, giving it a multi-dimensional panorama where semantic issues are intertwined among different perspectives. The later solution presents an approach which considers raw information being processed into product features, refining knowledge during PDP and making it reusable in different cycles. The approach brings a new view on practical methods for automatically collect product requirements, extract its knowledge and translate it into product features, based on knowledge extraction methods and by using semantic reconciliation as means for translating product’s requirements. Further research will focus on expanding the approach and including more features to increasingly complex cases, to explore the full potential of the approach.