Towards an Ontology for Product Version Management

Abstract

During its lifecycle, products are affected by market, technology, and user requirements. Without a process for efficiently handling product changes, product data, which is spread in different areas and systems, might become unusable, incomplete, or inconsistent. A simple change on product information may trigger a domino effect that could be very difficult to control. In order to reduce this effect, knowledge is important to answer what, when, why, and how a change occurred. This article proposes an ontology that allows capturing product changes in order to answer the aforementioned questions. The proposed ontology extends PRoductONTOlogy (PRONTO) (Vegetti et al., 2011) to represent product family changes. OWL implementation of the proposed ontology is presented with a simple case study to validate it.