Ontology-Based Knowledge Management Systems for the New Product Development Acceleration: Case of a Community of Designers of Automotives

Knowledge management is important for the knowledge storage and organization. Otherwise information about new product development can be dispersed or lost, thus, finding efficient manners to store knowledge in order to be able to search for it and retrieve it is necessary. Ontology is a good solution for the structuring of information and knowledge and especially in specific cases as communities of practice.In this paper, we present the followed methodology for the modeling of the ontology and the technological architecture of a knowledge management system(KMS), based on this ontology, to facilitate knowledge sharing within special communities. The modeling technique is the IDEF0 methodology, the ontology is codified using the OWL language and the KMS is supported by the OC4J of the J2EE server.