An Ontological Approach to Managing Project Memories in Organizations

Abstract

Knowledge Management (KM) is considered by many organizations a key aspect in sustaining competitive advantage. In the mechanical design domain, the KM facilitates the design of routine product and brings a saving time for innovation. This chapter describes the specification of a project memory as an organizational memory to specify knowledge to capitalize all along project in order to be reuse. Afterwards it presents the design of a domain ontology and a multi agent system to manage project memories all along professional activities. As a matter of fact, these activities require that engineers, with different specialities, collaborate to carry out the same goal. Inside professional activities; they use their knowhow and knowledge in order to achieve the laid down goals. The professional actors competences and knowledge modeling allows the design and the description of agents’ know-how. Furthermore, the paper describes the design of our agent model based on an organisational approach and the role of a domain ontology called OntoDesign to manage heterogeneous and distributed knowledge.