Formalization of semantic annotation for systems interoperability in a PLM environment

Abstract

Nowadays, the need for systems collaboration across enterprises and through different domains has become more and more ubiquitous. Due to the lack of standardized models or architecture, as well as semantic mismatching and inconsistencies, research works on information and model exchange, transformation, discovery and reuse are carried out in recent years. One of the main challenges in these researches is to overcome the semantic gap between enterprise applications along any product lifecycle, involving many distributed and heterogeneous enterprise applications. We propose, in this paper, an approach for semantically annotating different knowledge views (business process models, business rules, conceptual models, and etc.) in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. These formal semantic annotations will make explicit the tacit knowledge generally engraved in application models and act as bridges to support all actors along the product lifecycle. A case study based on a specific manufacturing process will be presented for demonstrating how our semantic annotations can be applied in a Business to Manufacturing (B2M) interoperability context. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.