Distributed Cross-Domain Link Creation for Flexible Data Integration and Manageable Data Interoperability Standards

A distributed link creation strategy represents a shift from the traditional centralized link creation strategy used for data integration. A distributed link creation strategy provides a more flexible, user-friendly approach for engineers to specify cross-domain links between different domains of engineering data, which is key to achieving traceability across different product lifecycle phases. A new type of API that allows API clients to find link targets easily and create links makes this possible. Features of this new link-enabling API include support for the open-world assumption, embeddable search dialogs, and hypermedia for self-discovery. Furthermore, a distributed link creation strategy also supports more efficient standardization efforts to achieve data interoperability by only requiring small, thus more manageable, domain-specific standards in combination with standardized cross-domain links, in contrast to the typically large, therefore unmanageable, multi-domain standards. © 2022 by Axel Reichwein. Published by INCOSE with permission.