A Research on Knowledge-Centered System for Ship Basic Design - Semantic Web Approach -

Abstract

The basic design of ships refers to a determination process of ship major characteristics. It is a knowledge intensive work that needs variety of shipbuilding knowledge such as past design practices of similar ships, formulas and design procedures. This paper shows a concept and its implementation of knowledge-centered system for ship basic design, which enables designers to retrieve relevant knowledge effectively from a knowledge base. As the core of the system, Semantic Web technology is used. Semantic Web provides a framework for building knowledge base by using metadata and ontology. The authors define a set of metadata and ontology for representing past ship designs. On top of those structured data, a process driven design support system is developed. The system directly support ship basic design process by assisting knowledge capturing from past design cases and presenting relevant design knowledge.