The Real Semantic Desktop
July 22, 2011 Leave a Comment
Our CAD, CAE and EDA tools are rich environments, and they know a lot about what we’re designing. But not everyone can look over the shoulder of the engineer using these specialized tools, and as in any team environment, we ultimately rely on communicating through meetings, documents, presentations and emails. These things are sometimes called “unstructured data” as buzz-wordy way of saying that they are imperfect by nature. The stress on a part of some structure has just been analyzed in great detail by some FEA tool, but we only take the time to report the main result in an email to a colleague, leaving aout lots of contextual information. That colleague then uses it in a spreadsheet, again documenting what is relevant to them, and we get even further from the original richness of the information.
Jim Hendler’s famous semantic web mantra “a little bit of semantics goes a long way” applies generally to the problem of information dilution in our desktop engineering environment. The term “semantic desktop” came on the scene regarding improved personal information management but it is a deep and general problem for all kinds of information, especially in engineering.
Much of PLM’s value seems to be simply aggregating and making available all of the documents associated with engineering projects, but very little progress has been made in addressing the lossiness of the communications those documents contain. We see this as an unneccesssary deficit of our desktop workplace. There is really no reason that when information is documented and communicated by people that precision and context have to be jettisoned. It is “simply” a matter of evolving our desktop environment toward the preservation of meaning and context as we move it from points of origin to documents, and from documents into our CAE and EDA tools. Truenumbers are one step in that direction, we expect that this evolution toward adding little bits of semantics will indeed go a long way
