Towards a formal design model based on a genetic design model system

The research presented in this article is aimed to the investigation of the nature, building and practical role of a Design Ontology as a potential framework for the more efficient product development data-, information- and knowledge- description, -explanation, -understanding and -reusing. In this article, we briefly summarize our experience of converting informal definitions of the concepts from the product development domain based on the existing theoretical background into formal design model. As a main data source for extracting the content of a design ontology, Genetic Design Model System developed by N.H. Mortensen was chosen. In order to achieve the useful formalization of the GDMS structure we have followed modelling procedure on the four levels: epistemological, generic, domain and project level. As an epistemological foundation, The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) proposed by IEEE, provides us definitions for the most general and universal concepts, that we used in our research for derivation of terms definitions and axioms in the Design Ontology. The Design Ontology was evaluated using the OntoEdit® ontology engineering environment, on a real product example, and based on this evaluation further research steps are proposed.