OpenEngSB: Ontology-based Information Linking in Systems Engineering

Description

During the design phase of complex engineering systems different engineers contribute with their results developed in local development spaces. Resulting artefacts may consists of various files and modelling structures linking to related files. At the end contributing local artefacts should be linked with the overall system and made available to the entire project. The structure of the overall system and its linking points are defined by a special plant engineer.

The challenge is to provide an efficient versioning of changes in local development spaces, links between local spaces and overall system, and overall system structure. In general, the goal is to link elements of different data models and distinguish between private and public development results while keeping such information under version control.

Using semantic web technologies, the resulting outcome is a prototype that is able to

version linking models
facilitate private and public work spaces
provide features like: branching and conflict detection

Benefit for the Student

the student will be given a chance to be involved in a real industrial use case with the supervision of experience mentor(s)
try out and experience a relatively new technologies in action (e.g, ontology, EMF, OSGi)

Benefit for the Project

depending on the quality of the resulted software, it could be included as part of the new architecture of OpenEngSB.
information linking is one of features that expected to be released within OpenEngSB in 2015.

Requirements

The ideal candidates for this project must have a solid

Java knowledge with OSGi
Semantic modelling experience with ontology / semantic web technology stack

Experience with EMF is a plus.

Mentors

Richard Mordinyi, Stefan Scheiber, Marta Sabou