Organizations designing complex technical systems need to understand the relationships between various engineering artifacts such as requirements, design and manufacturing information. These relationships should be captured in a global graph, which can then be queried by di erent stakeholders. However, engineering data is authored in hundreds of di erent applications with different APIs. Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) provides a standard approach to expose data in the RDF format with REST APIs, which in turn supports data interconnectivity and graph-based data processing. The global graph can quickly be built if heterogeneous engineering data is available in a neutral data format and accessible through a standard API, as provided by OSLC. Without the adoption of standards, it is practically impossible to build a fully comprehensive global graph for engineering. Without such a graph, the impact of design decisions can lead to unforeseen errors, which in the worst case can lead to fatal accidents.
Axel Reichwein and Fernando Lopez which requirement. Based on a digital representation of these traceability relationships, engineers can navigate through these relationships, perform queries on these links and e ciently assess the impact of design changes. 2
Engineering organizations use di erent software applications to describe di erent aspects of a system, such as requirements, test cases, architecture models, simulation models, 3D geometric models, etc. There are over 500 di erent engineering applications to describe and simulate various system aspects. Each software application uses a speci c data format and API. This data heterogeneity currently prevents an organization from e ciently analyzing all their data as a whole. Data integration solutions for engineering data exist but are limited to speci c engineering disciplines, such as software engineering in the form of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions, mechanical engineering in the form of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, systems engineering in the form of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) solutions, manufacturing data in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, and sensor data in the form of IoT (Internet of Things) solutions.
Engineering organizations need a global graph to capture in a machine-readable format the traceability links describing cross-cutting concerns. Unfortunately, due to the data heterogeneity, the ExtractTransform-Load (ETL) process to merge data from all engineering applications into one global graph currently represents a huge e ort in time and money and is practically impossible to realize. Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) [1{3] provides standards to simplify the ETL process, and for subsequently linking data within a global graph. 3
Engineering applications are increasingly supporting REST APIs. However, many generic aspects of
engineering data such as its version, the project it belongs to, its change history, or the data model
it conforms to, are currently described in a multitude of di erent ways. The OSLC Core Speci cation
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OSLC APIs [