Using Semantics to Bridge the Information and Knowledge Sharing Gaps in Virtual Engineering

In a Product Life Cycle (PLC) scenario, different Virtual Engineering Applications (VEA) are used in order to design, calculate and, in general, to provide an application scenario for computation engineering. The diverse VEA are not necessarily available when information sharing is needed, a fact that represents a semantic loss as the knowledge gained by using one VEA can be lost if a data translation occurs (e.g. a Finite Element program is normally able to export only the geometry). In this paper we present an architecture and a system implementation based on semantic technologies which allows a seamless information and knowledge sharing between VEA in a PLC scenario. Our approach is validated through a Plant Layout Design application which is able to collect knowledge provided by different VEA available. This work presents our system leaving a statistical analysis for future work, as at the moment our system is being tested.