Abstract
This paper presents an ontology maintenance approach aiming at dynamically maintaining the federation collaboration ontology in High Level Architecture (HLA) federation development and execution process, with the objective to provide guidelines on how to use, organize and manipulate federation collaboration ontology to meet various requirements. The proposed approach includes two algorithms: ontology maintenance (+) and ontology maintenance (−), corresponding to federate joining and resigning. It adopts an axiom-based deduction strategy and takes heavy-weighted ontologies into consideration. It can find all the explicit and derived inter-ontology relations. A case study shows that the proposed approach has great potential to improve the efficiency of federation development and execution processes, reduce the workload for adaptive adjustment of existing platforms, and enhance the applicability and flexibility of HLA based collaborative product development systems.