Semantic design cuts costs, saves time
EU-funded researchers have developed an innovative semantic engineering environment that will help product designers increase their productivity while saving time. The SevenPro ('Semantic virtual engineering environment for product design') project, backed by the EU with more than EUR 2.6 million in financing, targeted technology and tool development to support deep mining of product engineering knowledge from multimedia repositories and semantically enhanced 3D interaction. The SevenPro project partners were quoted by ICT Results as saying that the state-of-the-art system offers designers a user-oriented way to handle design data and product lifecycle information, compared with what is currently available on the market. Introducing a semantic layer into a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system gives users the boost they need to visualise products, components and materials in virtual reality, according to the partners. 'It makes it possible to graphically browse all the data associated with a certain product, [which] makes data and data associations easier to identify and greatly improves the workflow,' explained Mikel Renteria, Head of Technology at Semantic Systems in Spain, which is the coordinator of SevenPro. The upshot of this development is not only that the level of production will rise, but also that engineers and designers will save time and money. 'Many companies today still store information on paper files, while others keep key design data in obscure databases and repositories where it is either hard to find or cannot be accessed at all,' Mr Renteria said. 'Engineers still have to pick up the phone to call colleagues who worked on past projects to obtain information that should be readily accessible to them. It takes a lot of time and reduces productivity.' Both people and computers will be able to understand the information since the data are annotated semantically. Eventually, it will facilitate the search and establishment of links with other information regardless of whether the information is stored in network databases or distributed files. The partners noted how the project's semantic environment depends on an adaptable ontology, consisting of a vocabulary of related concepts used to assign meaning to data and describe the relationships between data items. 'One of the major advantages of our system over the off-the-shelf PLM systems currently available is that it is highly customisable,' Mr Renteria underlined. 'We do not use a set ontology but rather adapt the ontology to the products, services and design processes in use at a particular company.' Companies keen on using this system will not have to spend money to adapt their processes to the system; the system will adapt to their processes via its own semantic model. The partners explained that the system can be used with various kinds of data and pre-installed software including Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). So what does the future hold? The SevenPro partners have already started marketing a commercial version of the platform called 'Repcon KRP'. The consortium is seeking partners and investors to help develop the product further. Beneficiaries of this development will be small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large companies, as Mr Renteria noted, adding, 'It offers a rapid return on investment.'