How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part One (Product Value Management)

How Practical Are Product Definition Ontologies? - Part One (Product Value Management): "Recently, much has been done in conceptualizing various advanced constructs to enable at least targeted subsets of the product definition reconciliation scope prescribed by the '12-Fold Way' framework. Shared representations have been developed for generic physical architectures reconciling 3D part designs with configurable engineering BOM-s. Also, generic feature architectures have been deployed to reconcile definable sales configurations with pick to order and assemble to order manufacturing BOM-s. While these advances solve particular product definition reconciliation problems, they can be implemented in a variety of information management architectural approaches. Two conceptual approaches come to mind: meta-schema mappings and ontologies."