Conclusions and future work

• The approach formalises the knowledge contained in a product support system with the use of ontological principles

• Product support responsiveness is improved by prescribing the knowledge sets required and how these should be represented

• Interoperability is advanced by creating an ontology (the knowledge model) that can be shared and reused by other systems

• This work is a step towards formalising product support as a knowledge intensive process

• Futire work includes the development of a knowledge engineering framework where the ontology will be one of the major components