Semantic Technologies for the Integration of Methods into an Enterprise Architecture

In order to face today's challenges in product development, like product complexity, variability and a shortening of development cycles, for instance, in the automotive domain, the Product Development Process (PDP) tends to entail more and more virtual tasks instead of physical, conventional ones, for example, implemented by Computer Aided x (CAx) technologies. The introduced novel approach promotes this transformation by supporting the appropriate stakeholders in formalizing, analyzing, assessing, comparing and hence selecting the most suitable methods, like physical and virtual design methods or CAx methods, that are utilized to execute these tasks. The separation of knowledge types by applying Semantic Technologies, like ontologies, rules and queries, enables the appropriate roles to manage this knowledge independently and in their own way, because (conceptual) domain knowledge, (operational) business rules and an implemented data model have different lifecycles, scopes and owners. Furthermore, this particular domain and business knowledge features interdependencies with remaining enterprise knowledge, including business processes, organizational aspects and the IT architecture, which is usually modeled in an Enterprise Architecture (EA). Therefore, we showcase the implementation and integration of a method meta model, method contexts, like metrics and product knowledge, and an EA using Semantic Technologies to promote the transparency, interchange, interconnection, synchronization, sharing, reusability, re-deployment, up-todateness and maintenance of this particular knowledge and consequently analyses and assessments based on it.