TOWARDS A FORMAT REGISTRY FOR ENGINEERING DATA

ABSTRACT There has been a great deal of interest recently in the problem of long term archiving of digital data. This is especially so in engineering design, where the CAD software tools evolve rapidly but the manufactured products themselves have much longer lifetimes whose support requires archived design data in a usable form. The ISO Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) Reference Model is a widely used standard for digital archiving, with an essential piece of this model being a file format registry. A file format registry is a system for housing information about file formats that allows for correct interpretation, rendering, storage, and translation of digital files. Currently there exists no file format registry specifically for CAD file formats. This paper explains the purpose of a file format registry for CAD in the greater context of digital archiving, and then presents our approach to creating a CAD file format registry using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) language of the Semantic Web. By creating our file format registry in RDF, we allow archival systems to perform automated reasoning on the stored files. We hope that this paper will increase awareness of this element of engineering design repositories in the research community of this conference

Digital archiving and retrieval tool

Our poster will present DART, the Digital Archiving and Retrieval Tool, a system intended to support engineers in archiving digital data developed over the course of the design process. DART is a direct product of recent experiences in adding collaboration, archiving, and version control systems to project components of university-level engineering curricula. The primary insights include the necessity of minimal disruption to the workflow and the utility of a basic, data-grabbing, "cyber-forensics" approach to digital archiving. The system incorporates those principles, providing a tool by which useful data and context may be stored while imposing minimal learning curve or workflow change. An explicit tradeoff is made between the ability to easily manage and analyze archived data versus adoption of the tool and successful data archiving

Description Logic-Ground Knowledge Integration and Management

This abstract describes ongoing work in developing large-scale knowledge repositories. The project addresses three primary aspects of such systems: integration of knowledge sources; access and retrieval of stored knowledge; scalable, effective repositories. Previous results have shown the effectiveness of description logicbased representations in integrating knowledge sources and the role of non-standard inferences in supporting repository reasoning tasks. Current efforts include developing general-purpose mechanisms for adapting reasoning algorithms for optimized inference under known domain structure and effective use of database technology as a large-scale knowledge base backend. Knowledge Repositories Modern scientific and engineering efforts rely on large volumes of data and knowledge. It is therefore important to support such efforts with knowledge repositories, significan

Functional Modeling of Engineering Designs for the Semantic Web

A goal of this paper is to briefly describe work on a novel application of the Semantic Web to design repositories---collections of diverse engineering knowledge with sophisticated reasoning services. However, a more general goal of this paper is to demonstrate the extra utility enabled in database-styled applications by the incorporation of even simple semantics. It also discusses the development of practical, useful representations and applications for the Semantic Web

Design Repositories On The Semantic Web With Description-Logic Enabled Services

All engineering firms maintain archives of previously designed artifacts, often in the form of databases of computer aided design (CAD) data. Design repositories are an evolution of such databases to include more heterogenous information and to provide enhanced capabilities through the application of knowledge representation techniques. This paper introduces on-going work on applying description logic and the Semantic Web to constructing such design repositories

Network Awareness and the Philadelphia Area Urban Wireless Network Testbed

This paper overviews the Philadelphia Area Urban Wireless Network Testbed (PA-UWNT) project and several applications of artificial intelligence therein. PA-UWNT is a research and development effort in mobile and ubiquitous computing, focusing on communication and collaboration between first responders and other emergency personnel. Support systems in these environments face a number of challenges such as a lack of in-place infrastructure, frequent network disruptions, and limited bandwidth and power. The Testbed, consisting of robust networked computing platforms along with access to public and private locations, enables the project to test, evaluate, and develop new approaches to effectively supporting users in these domains. In this work, agents that reason on network state and available services in conducting information dissemination and collection tasks are proposed and evaluated