Key concepts of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) reflect on the difference between a “web of documents” and “web of data.” As a standard for interoperability and enterprise platform integration (based on HTTP, RDF and LDP), OSLC promotes data linkages and direct traceability at the source to minimize integration complexity from data duplication.
With similar attendance to OSLC Fest 2021, it’s clear that many OEMs and PLM software editors support the initiative, such as IBM, Siemens, PTC, Tasktop, Kovair, Sodius, Maplesoft, MID, pure-systems and many more. It is also clear that the initiative is going beyond application lifecycle management (ALM) and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) in scope.
Building on OSLC principles, the event aimed to answer questions such as: “How can we achieve a Google for data? How can we query data from different databases seamlessly as if it were in one big global database? How can we establish links between data of different databases and how should we manage them? Similar questions have already been solved for documents by the World Wide Web. But what about data?”
In this post, I discuss key messages captured through some of the presentations from the OSLC Fest 2022 event, covering technical requirements to make digital threads real.
In their AIAA journal article entitled “Engineering Design with Digital Thread,” published in 2018, Singh and Wilcox defined the digital thread as “a data-driven architecture that links together information generated from across the product lifecycle and is envisioned to be the primary or authoritative data and communication platform for a company’s products at any instance of time.”
Simply put, building a digital thread is about connecting data across authoring sources and consuming applications. Many argue that there are multiple digital threads as data continuity is not linear across the product lifecycle, organizational functions and broadly speaking, across the extended enterprise.
To that end, OSLC Fest 2022 called for contributions across the following themes:
- Industrial use cases and experiences using OSLC.
- OSLC in action, and demonstration of tools integrations to extend the OSLC ecosystem.
- OSLC as a backbone for digital engineering.
- Applying OSLC to new domains.
- Tools and automation to implement OSLC connectors.
- New OSLC language SDKs.
- Advanced OSLC topics such as global configurations and TRS.
- Calls for extending OSLC.
Some of the key takeaways from the event can be summarized with the following six points:
- OEMs can leverage OSLC-based toolchains for MBSE, including requirements, architecture and cross-domain configuration management—referring to the presentation by Martin Ulrich from Robert Bosch GmbH.
- Though OSLC standards for data traceability are clearly articulated, clear implementation examples are required to explain the concepts and relationships with practical OEM-based use cases—as highlighted in the presentation by Erik Herzog from SAAB Aeronautics.
- OSLC standards can foster enterprise data dependency management to track product changes, ensuring continuous compliance and driving associated maintenance activities—as discussed in the presentation by Hanns Schulz-Mirbach, Carina Schaefer and Jayakumar Palanivel from Drägerwerk and Wipro.
- Feedback loops from customer behavior and after-sales operations, through to new product requirements, can leverage OSLC standards to drive product optimization and compliance—as conceptually illustrated in the presentation by Jens Krueger from NTT DATA.
- OSLC integration can support collaborative application development—as presented by Juan Quintanar from Koneksys.
- OSLC profile and use case standardization can contribute to better enterprise platform integration configuration—as discussed in the presentation by Eran Gery from IBM.
Other presentations addressed questions of coding, connector development, feedback loops, the transition from SysML v1 to v2, implementation toolkits and other technical frameworks. Overall, most presentations were quite technical, focusing on the layer underneath data connectivity tools, technologies, APIs, coding, code management and associated data or integration standards. As a result, the conference is targeting developers, product managers, innovation leaders and tech enthusiasts.
Clearly such a conference would benefit from more real-world OSLC use cases and return-on-experience. Otherwise, most business leaders will have little to no understanding of the benefits of OSLC. In short, the discipline and associated standards would sincerely improve from more OEM-based feedback. This feedback could help to translate technical standards into business cases that executives can use to understand how to:
- Define “just enough” data continuity for an integration MVP.
- Leverage an “integration platform” that aligns to OSLC standards.
- Build cross-platform scalable digital threads without adding to the integration complexity.
- Embed product lifecycle change management practices with an enterprise OSLC architecture.
- Consider an OSLC-compatible enterprise platform or ensure future OSLC compatibility and evolution.
- Appreciate and assess how OSLC standards are embedded into off-the-shelf tools and apps.
- Integrate two OSLC compatible applications; for instance, across a PLM platform and an ERP platform.
- Mitigate OSLC-driven solution implication risks.
- Scope and implement the relevant OSLC MVP.
- Decide what data to link versus integrate or synchronize.
- Plan OSLC implementations with legacy apps and platforms which might not support REST API or other OSLC standards.
- Determine how OSLC enables MBSE by leveraging data linkages across requirements, functional and logical architectures, and physical product parameters.
This last question is critical when considering how to drive system engineering traceability across multiple data sources, building PLM to PLM, or PLM to ERP interfaces. Avoiding data duplication and working with linked data is a core principle of effective product lifecycle management, independently of the system or technology.
What are your thoughts?