Abstract
The deployment of knowledge-based engineering systems is on the increase within engineering industries and, as such, there will be an ever-increasing demand to share a common product representation, which includes design and manufacturing knowledge. At the moment, each commercial knowledge-based engineering system has its own development language and therefore representation language for design and manufacturing knowledge. To date, no work has fully addressed the need to exchange product knowledge as well as product data. It is, therefore, the main aim of this paper to demonstrate the need for a standard product knowledge representation language and how it could be developed by using existing standards, thereby providing the ability to exchange product knowledge as well as product data.
