| AAAI-93, Working Notes, Reasoning About Function, pp. 137- 140. An Ontology of Mechanical Devices (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| We are working to develop a large scale ontology for the mechanical engineering world to support a wide range of tasks including analysis and design. Our work is guided by the task of determining the behavior of a mechanical device from a description of its geometry (the shapes of its parts and how they are connected) and its driving inputs. We look for common patterns of behavior and label them with the terms that mechanical engineers use to talk about mechanical devices. We attribute function to the components of a device by relying on the assumption that their intended purpose is to provide the identified behavioral patterns. We began in the familiar fashion, by examining the language used by engineers to describe how mechanical devices work. We looked at the explanations in Artobolevsky's six volume Mechanisms in Modern Engineering Design, with its 5,000 mechanical devices, noted the "mechanical elements " in Shigley's text, Mechanical Engineering Design, and, in the spirit of great tinkerers everywhere, took apart several mechanical devices, including cameras and circuit breakers, to see "how they worked " and to try to give precise descriptions of their function. The Ontology One of the interesting discoveries we made early on was how much understanding of devices is taken for granted in standard sources, even the introductory texts. For example, Shigley's definition of a shaft is "a rotating or stationary member, usually of circular cross section, having mounted on it such elements as gears, pulleys, flywheels, cranks, sprockets, and other powertransmission elements. " By this definition, nearly every mechanical component is a shaft. This is a widespread phenomenon: text books uniformly assume that the basic definitions are so obvious that no explanation is needed. | |||||||||||||||
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