Next: 8 References Up: Appnotes Index Previous:6 Application of the RASSP Reuse Approach
Next: 8 References
Up: Appnotes Index
Previous:6 Application of the RASSP Reuse Approach
The technology prototyped as a part of this effort has far reaching implications for the development of enterprise systems in the future, for the meaning of the terms open system and interoperability, and for any situation requiring integration of multiple applications, sources of business and technical knowledge, or a combination of the two. The application of knowledge representation concepts to problems of concurrent engineering, collaborative work, and integrated manufacturing is relatively new to the commercial community, though work has been funded in this and related cognitive science areas for a number of years. The problems related to information access and more importantly, decision support, in a collaborative engineering environment are difficult to solve due to the diversity and potential nature of the data and applications present in the environment. Issues involving information access across databases and applications in general are extremely complex, in part because each database instance or application is in all likelihood distinct, frequently poorly documented, and the individuals who developed them may no longer be available.
A significant portion of the work involved in establishing requirements for a system capable of enterprise-wide collaborative engineering and design reuse support, in soliciting feedback from the user community, in defining the ontologies and processes and in preparing the demonstrations described herein was accomplished essentially as an applied research and consulting task. This task required resources well beyond what was originally anticipated by the program, as is frequently the case with data warehouse and other database applications development. As the requirements became clearer and the task more and more well-defined, the work required to fulfill those requirements and our collective vision increased as well. The knowledge gained through this process, however, was also significant and will be applied to many other programs and opportunities in the future.
7.0 Conclusion
An application such as the RASSP Reuse Data Manager and its underlying Sandpiper Intelligent Information Broker (IIB) can save organizations large sums of money by simplifying and enabling knowledge integration tasks. The number and variety of potential applications for this technology is broad. Due to the level of complexity, a significant applied research investment will have been made prior to productization of the IIB, however. This kind of application also requires large amounts of test data and a number of test domains in order to validate the approach and functionality of the solution. We have successfully proven, though, that the broker technology is capable of resolving conflicts among terms, enabling integration across multiple, diverse sources of information, and supporting collaborative engineering and design reuse on the RASSP program.
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