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From Physical Artefacts to Products

The central activity of industries is to produce and sell products. Although we all share a common understanding of what a product is, there is no formal definition of this concept which is satisfactory from an ontological viewpoint and could serve as a departure point for enterprise integration. To fill this gap, we look at the notion of product from the perspective of foundational ontology: we concentrate on the industrial meaning with particular attention to the manufacturing domain, that is, we consider products as physical artefacts that are the result of intentional activities. The paper provides a first formalization of this notion relying on the concept of artefact as developed within the framework of the DOLCE ontology. In this framework, an artefact is created when an entity (the constituent of the artefact) is selected by an agent for some purpose or intentional use; this act of the agent (the creator) brings out the artefact, which is necessarily co-localized with the constituent and is characterized by a new type of quality dubbed selected capacity. Thus, our approach to characterize the concept of product (as well as some related notions) consists in searching for a specialization of the ontological notion of artefact which is satisfactory for the industry domain.