This paper introduces an approach to an ontology-based knowledge framework for product lifecycle management (PLM). Participants in a product life cycle want to share comprehensive product knowledge without any ambiguity and heterogeneity. However, previous knowledge management approaches are limited in providing those aspects. Therefore, we suggest an ontology-based knowledge framework including knowledge maps, axioms and specific knowledge for domain. The bottom level, the axiom, specifies the semantics of concepts and relations of knowledge so that ambiguity of the semantics can be alleviated. The middle level is a product development knowledge map; it defines the concepts and the relations of the product domain common knowledge and guides engineers to process their engineering decisions. The middle level is then classified further into more detailed levels, such as generic product level, specific product level, product version level, and product item level for PLM. The top level is specialized knowledge for a specific domain that gives the solution of a specific task or problem. It is classified into three knowledge types: expert knowledge, engineering function knowledge, and data-analysis-based knowledge. This proposed framework is based on ontology to accommodate a comprehensive range of unambiguous knowledge for PLM and is represented with first-order logic to maintain a uniform representation.
