An ontological basis for computer aided innovation

Knowledge acquisition and capitalization to solve problems concerning artefact evolution, still called inventive design, has a certain quantity of specific characteristics. It needs the choice of certain pieces of knowledge that may induce evolutions; it leads to reformulating the initial problem to build an abstract model of the artefact. The theoretical approach we are interested in, called TRIZ (the Russian acronym for Theory for Inventive Problem Solving), when translated into a methodological procedure, has not been fully formalized yet. This article proposes an ontology of the main notions of the concepts associated to knowledge acquisition in this framework. This ontology, beyond the clarification it brings to the involved notions, will be the support of a software architecture for implementing the method for knowledge acquisition and problem formulation. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.