The role of semantic technologies in future PLM

Abstract

The paper describes research efforts to address three core problems of the complete process of product creation from an IT perspective and especially focusing on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Today's major challenges are the support of globally distributed and multi-disciplinary teams, complexity, and enterprise knowledge management. Essential building block for new approaches to cope with these challenges is the use of semantic technologies for the supportive IT environments. There are different aspects to be considered, integration of social software and community development in the context of open innovation and crowd sourcing as well as context driven enrichment of data and adaptive application integration. The aim of this contribution is to give a comprehensive overview of the requirements resulting from today's challenges and to introduce an approach to future IT working environment for engineers in the sense of organic computing (OC). Furthermore, the paper shows how Semantic Web technologies can contribute to more individual and flexible engineering application integration and knowledge management.