Driving Digital Engineering Integration and Interoperability Through Semantic Integration of Models with Ontologies

TL;DR

This paper presents DEFII, a framework utilizing Semantic Web Technologies to improve data integration and interoperability across complex, multi-disciplinary engineering models, enabling a unified, tool-agnostic source of truth.

Contribution

The paper introduces DEFII, a novel framework that incorporates SWT into engineering tasks, including a new Model Interface Specification Diagram for standardized, tool-agnostic data representation.

Findings

Enhanced data interoperability across engineering domains

Creation of a tool-agnostic authoritative data source

Improved reasoning capabilities with semantic integration

Abstract

Engineered solutions are becoming more complex and multi-disciplinary in nature. This evolution requires new techniques to enhance design and analysis tasks that incorporate data integration and interoperability across various engineering tool suites spanning multiple domains at different abstraction levels. Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) offer data integration and interoperability benefits as well as other opportunities to enhance reasoning across knowledge represented in multiple disparate models. This paper introduces the Digital Engineering Framework for Integration and Interoperability (DEFII) for incorporating SWT into engineering design and analysis tasks. The framework includes three notional interfaces for interacting with ontology-aligned data. It also introduces a novel Model Interface Specification Diagram (MISD) that provides a tool-agnostic model representation enabled by SWT that exposes data stored for use by external users through standards-based interfaces. Use of the framework results in a tool-agnostic authoritative source of truth spanning the entire project, system, or mission.