ONTOLOGY-BASED DESIGN RATIONALE RETRIEVAL SUPPORTING NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERY

Design rationale is an important category of design knowledge. Effective reuse of design rationale depends on its successful retrieval. In this paper, an ontology-based design rationale retrieval approach is presented, based on which, users can input natural language questions to search what they want. First, a database of ontology-based design rationale is constructed, which supports SPARQL query. Then, several SPARQL templates are defined according to different knowledge query requirements in engineering design domain. Moreover; a SPARQL query generating method is proposed to generate SPARQL query from natural language query automatically through template matching and keywords extending. Finally, a design rationale retrieval prototype system is implemented, and the experimental results show the advantages of the proposed approach.