In many application domains, the management of large volumes of unstructured and inconsistent information processes is a challenging task. Rather than by inventing ad hoc processes, one may address such problems by resorting to general concepts and powerful methodologies that have arisen in the semantic web, and thus leverage already-existing tools for automated reasoning and inferring new knowledge.

This paper demonstrates this point by presenting a novel semantic knowledge management system, SLACKS, for supporting the design, analysis, and manufacturing of laminated composite products that are heavily used in the automobile and aerospace industries. The foundation of SLACKS is a materials ontology that reuses a previously developed suite of engineering design ontologies. The ontology is written in the web ontology description logic OWL-DL with the help of the Protege-OWL tool; by applying Protege plug-in reasoners, various consistency checks can be performed, such as whether the ontology is satisfiable.

To illustrate the benefits of SLACKS, data about materials used in wind turbine blades and corresponding material tests were imported from various sources. Then, the reasoning capabilities of Protege were applied to consolidate and properly structure this information by using the OWL query languages SPARQL and SQWRL. Furthermore, the results of wind turbine analysis software were imported via the Extensible Markup Language (XML) transformation language Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT); the reasoners were then applied to identify requirement violations. The results show how semantic web technologies may considerably simplify the integration, management, and inference of information; this experience may be well transferred to many other areas.