An industrial evaluation of data access techniques for the interoperability of engineering software tools

• Published in: Journal of industrial information integration Vol. 15; pp. 58 - 68
• Main Authors: El-khoury, Jad, Berezovskyi, Andrii, Nyberg, Mattias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01-09-2019
• Subjects: Information management; Linked data; OSLC; SQL To RDF; Tool integration; Tool interoperability; SQL To RDF; Information management; Linked data; Tool interoperability; OSLC; Tool integration
• ISSN: 2452-414X; 2467-964X; 2452-414X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jii.2019.04.004

New industrial initiatives such as Industrie 4.0 rely on digital end-to-end engineering across the entire product lifecycle, which in turn depends on the ability of the supporting software tools to interoperate. A tool interoperability approach based on Linked Data, and the OASIS OSLC standard, has the potential to provide such integration, where each software tool can expose its information and services to other tools using the web as a common technology base. In this paper, we report on our negative findings when attempting to use existing ontology-based Linked Data access techniques to expose and manipulate the structured content managed in engineering tools. Such techniques typically target the Data Access Layer (DAL) of a tool to access and manipulate its content, with the assumption that sufficient information and control is available within this layer to automate the process. Based on a case study with the truck manufacturer Scania CV AB, our study finds that an engineering tool controls its artefacts using business logic that is not necessarily reflected at the data layer. This renders such ontology-based access techniques inadequate. Instead we propose an alternative Linked Data extraction architecture that can mitigate the identified shortcomings. While less automated compared to the existing solutions, the proposed architecture is realised as a standalone library that can still facilitate the extraction process.