The Engineering Knowledge Base Approach

Abstract

Systems and software engineering projects depend on the cooperation of experts from heterogeneous engineering domains using tools that were not designed to cooperate seamlessly. Current semantic engineering tool and data integration is often ad hoc and fragile, thereby making the evolution of tools and the reuse of integration solutions across projects unnecessarily inefficient and risky. This chapter describes the engineering knowledge base (EKB) framework for engineering environment integration in multidisciplinary engineering projects. The EKB stores explicit engineering knowledge to support access to and management of engineering models across tools and disciplines. The following Chaps. 5–7discuss individual aspects of the EKB framework, which provides (1) data integration based on mappings between local and domain-level engineering concepts; (2) transformations between local engineering concepts; and (3) advanced applications built on these foundations, e.g., end-to-end analyses. As a result, experts from different organizations may use their well-known tools and data models and can access data from other tools in their syntax. Typical applications enabled by implementations of this framework are discussed in Chaps. 9and 10.