Ontology-Based Dynamic Forms for Manufacturing Capability Information Collection.

Building flexible manufacturing supply chains requires availability of interoperable and accurate manufacturing service capability (MSC) information. These requirements can be met by encoding the MSC information using shared domain ontologies. However, difficulty in understanding the syntax and semantics of the shared ontologies hinders the adoption of such ontology-based approach. In this paper, we propose an Ontology-based eXtensible Dynamic Form (OXDF) user interface architecture to assist non-expert users to collect MSC information and represent that information as instances of the shared domain ontology. To achieve this result, we introduce three key innovations: 1) intelligent ontology navigation that dynamically generates forms and form components from the relevant parts of the ontology; 2) intelligent search engine that helps finding relevant ontology entities; and 3) an update mechanism that allows users to define new terminologies to the shared domain ontology.