XML based markup languages for knowledge management in manufacturing companies

摘要

The manufacturing industry is facing many new challenges including redefined customer expectations in the E-Commerce era. The consumer is now better informed, more demanding and has higher expectations in terms of product features, product performance and service. To respond to these expectations companies are seeking to leverage the collective experience of the organization and the consequent knowledge gained to deliver improved performance in product and service. However, some fundamental issues pertaining to formal and unambiguous definition of terms and semantics of the information to be stored and retrieved need to be addressed in the manufacturing industry to fully leverage Intranet enabled knowledge management. The formalization of such unambiguous vocabularies can be achieved through the construction of Industry Specific Markup Languages (ISMLs). In this paper, we present XML based ISMLs, Machining Markup Language (MML) and Foundry Markup Language (FML) for the machining and foundry industries respectively and illustrate proof-of-concept knowledge management applications or TOMEs (Treasury for manufacturing Experience) that use the ISMLs as the underlying data models.