Using Linked Data with Information Standards for Interoperability in Production Engineering

Design and verification of factory layout and material flow is a multidisciplinary, knowledge-intensive task which requires a collaborative framework where all specialists involved can communicate, interact, manage and visualize different models. However, the communication of digital models comes with challenges. The information resides in various systems and applications, in different formats and with various levels of detail and viewpoints. This makes the communication and sharing of information among different actors and application, challenging. To deal with the data exchange and integration problem, the information standards ISO 10303 (STEP) has shown a strong capability to represent rich information models in a wide variety of industrial domains for the purpose of exchanging data. On the other hand, the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative provides a minimalistic set of standardized information models, focusing on the most common concepts within a particular domain. Assuming a loosely-coupled distributed architecture of tools and services, OSLC adopts the Linked Data (LD) approach to ensure data consistency across the data resources. How can we combine STEP's rich information model for data exchange, with OSLC's minimalistic approach for data integration The aim of this work is to show the applicability of using these two complementary paradigms – and their corresponding standards to support interoperability and data integration in a heterogeneous IT environment for material flow analysis and layout design.