PMO - Product Modelling Ontology
From e-bouw.org wiki
PMO, short for Product Modelling Ontology, is the main result of SWOP. It is in essence a fully generic, freely reusable 'upper ontology' (generic data structure with knowledge) specified in OWL, the most prominent Semantic Web (SW) technology from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [W3C]. OWL is a more modern, fully web-based and distributed variant of the traditional ISO STEP technologies like EXPRESS and SPFF. Technically, PMO can be seen as a protocol stack layer on top of the series Internet, WWW, XML, RDF, RDFS and OWL specifically targeted at a generic way of 'product modelling'. End-user Products (on any complexity level so including standard catalogue items) will also be modelled by OWL ontologies reusing PMO.
PMO contains in a necessary and sufficient way all constructs to define any end-user product ontology, modelling all relevant end-user's product classes, properties and interrelationships (in particular specialisation and decomposition ) together with cardinalities, data types, units and default values. Rules in the form of assertions that have to be satisfied and derivations that can be executed add the more complex product knowledge. From this semantic end-user ontology in principle any representation/visualisation can be derived (think IAI IFC, Collada, OpenDXF, GDL, …). Currently, IFC2x3 STEP files and their XML variants (according to ifcXML) exports are supported. The primary semantic ontologies from which these formats are derived are however always the specifications that are used to integrate existing third-party software applications. Another, maybe even more interesting, application is where they form the basis for new advanced semantic applications such as smart product configurators often involving optimisation techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GAs).
In contrast to approaches trying to develop THE ontology for a given domain, PMO envisions a more flexible, evolutionary and moreover distributed approach (in specification, use and maintenance) to product modelling for both software integration and development. PMO can be used in general Semantic Web-tools such as the open source Protégé or the commercial TopBraid Composer toolkits. More specialised support is availed by the SWOP modeling tools developed by TNO in SWOP (PMO Configurator and PMO Browser) that are currently integrated. Some examples of the use of the PMO tools in the Building Construction context have been developed and will be presented along the paper.
More info can be found in Media:SWOP_D23_WP2_T2300_TNO_2008-04-15_v12.doc.
