Manufacturing system engineering ontology for semantic interoperability across extended project teams

Communication, knowledge sharing and awareness of available expertise are complex issues for any multidiscipline team. Complexity increases substantially in extended enterprise environments. The concepts of an MSE Moderator have previously been considered in environments with shared information models and vocabularies. These concepts are now translated to the realm of extended enterprises, where inevitably, individual partners will have their own terminology and information sources. An MSE Ontology is proposed to enable the operation of an extended enterprise MSE Moderator to provide common understanding of manufacturing-related terms, and therefore to enhance the semantic inter-operability and reuse of knowledge resources within globally extended manufacturing teams.