Our Steps to combine the Ontologies:
- First we found the commonality of our relationships and classes: apartment_floor and single-family-home were very similar. So we tried to install the apartment floor in the house. In doing so, we mixed all connections and classes so that the class structure made sense. We decided then to define our house from the requirements and the boundary conditions. In the following picture you see four circles, which describe the borders of our classes. We can see, that there are intersections. We realized, that everyone uses the concepts: material, function / purpose, requirement and component.
- After that we started sorting the concepts and answered the question which big concepts, relations should occur? So we defined the slab as a housecomponent. The diaphragm wall belongs to the building supplies. Both of them; building supplies and housecomponents, have properties and a purpose. So we decided to model them as subclasses from components both. Some of the concepts just one of us defined, we used now for the whole system: boundary conditions, geometry and direction. Overall, the following picture shows which connections we wanted to represent.
- In the end we defined our goal for our ontology. We wanted to show the dependence between components, their functions and properties and the requirements So we decided to have two higher level concepts: component, single‐family‐home. As in picture before, we are showing the “component” in yellow color and the “house” in green.
