Towards the Semantic Grid: A State of the Art Survey of Semantic Web Services and their Applicability to Collaborative Design, Engineering, and Procurement

ABSTRACT Today, organizations within the engineering and manufacturing domains place as much emphasis on the management and flow of knowledge through a value chain as they do commodities that are more tangible in nature. For example, parts suppliers in the Canadian automotive sector are often asked to collaborate with auto manufacturers in designing and engineering their product, instead of simply producing and supplying it. Such fundamental changes in the overarching economics of this industry have led to a greater focus on collaboration, both in terms of communicating across geographic divides to design components, as well as new requirements to merge heterogeneous data stores in order to manage this distributed procurement process. Our work on this project centred on finding solutions to the above by surveying the state of the industry, as well as assessing the potential employability of related tools in the workplace. It was concluded that the Access Grid (a low-cost, open-source videoconferencing platform) held significant potential to facilitate the high-quality sharing of audiovisual material, while semantic technologies (the "semantic web" and "semantic web services") represented a feasible solution to the issues of data integration. When combined, these technologies form the "semantic grid", the focus of this paper. Overall, it is concluded that the past and present business success of this ICT in the information management sector may, with future work, link databases with the visualization interface to provide concurrent cost-benefit analyses. INTRODUCTION This paper partially serves as a "business roadmap" for an international joint research initiative of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada and the Fraunhofer Institute (Fraunhofer IAO) in Stuttgart, Germany. The overall purpose of the project was to study the impact of emerging and convergent web and broad-based communications technologies on collaborative industrial design and manufacturing. Our primary work focused on creating new tools to better facilitate collaborative design and engineering, and this involved extending the Access Grid (AG)--a robust, open-source videoconferencing platform--to bridge geographic divides in the design process. Our interactions with the tools themselves are more fully detailed in a separate, forthcoming paper that we have authored (see also Fischer & Fraunhofer, 2006; Fischer, Murphy, Tippmann & Ayromlou, 2006, for background information). Our main focus in this paper concerns how this AG-enabled environment could then be annotated with semantic web services to make connections with existing procurement systems and parts databases. In doing so, it is hoped that the system could make inferences as to how manipulation of the design by any end-user affects the supply chain in terms of procurement and/or manufacturing costs. In this case, we refer to the semantic web services as being "ubiquitous" because of the focus on distributed, collaborative workflows. Our work was primarily focused on the impact to information management within the automotive sector to meet the immediate needs of our industrial partners. However, we do consider other applications (both within and outside of engineering and manufacturing) in this paper where appropriate. Research Objectives The objectives for this project were three-fold: first, to explore the potential and predicted impact of emerging technologies on collaborative industrial design; second, to assess the risks, potential return and probable development direction of these technologies so as to allow for strategic adoption by select businesses; third, to outline an actual technical reference architecture that can be implemented to meet specific requirements. This paper endeavours to meet the first two objectives by surveying the state of the industry and analyzing technological achievements with respect to their applicability and viability for deployment in business. …