Effective support of the product design stage in Supply Chain Management (SCM) is important for raising the competitive power of a company. Existing technology for design support of the supply chain has limitations in managing semantic data and handling logical operations, which agents will use for their intelligent and autonomous activities. In this paper, we suggest an ontology querying mechanism and a software component for it, based on the supply chain network, for the agent's intelligent activities. This querying engine can service several operations, including reasoning and logical functions, together with the ontology of the specified domain of product attributes and the ontology's instance data. We defined operators to provide the necessary ontology query according to the operation category in the domain of design support in the SCM, which will be provided as several interfaces in the form of server side components and web service. Finally, we explain the meaning of our querying system, comparing it with an earlier version and other querying systems.
['Incheon Paik', 'Hiroyuki Akimoto']
Ontology querying and its software component for design support in supply chains