Product Knowledge Management in Small Manufacturing Enterprises

Abstract

An important issue present in the most of manufacturing systems, and become worse in SMEs, is the systematic management of the huge amount of unstructured information generated about products, from their design to their disposal. The aim of this chapter is to define a framework to manage such kind of data, overcoming the actual issues of the meaningless and the unstructured nature of generated information. To this aim, a knowledge management platform is proposed, both to store product information with semantic enrichment and to retrieve product information by means of a new similarity index. Such platform is based on the one hand on a non-relational data management system and on the other hand on a set of manufacturing ontologies. An example of the potentiality of the proposed framework is shown in the domain of telecommunication filter manufacturing.