A semantic framework for data integration and communication in project consortia

Engineering project consortia represents the collaboration of different groups of partners to achieve a common goal, e.g., developing innovative products. This collaboration may be challenging because of different terminologies and different tools and data models used by the project partners. In this work, we present the concept of a Project Consortia Knowledge Base (PC-KB), an integration framework based on semantic knowledge that facilitates project-level communication as well as access to and querying of project data across tool and partner boundaries. The PC-KB allows establishing common data models on different abstraction layers within the consortia organization. Using these common models, the PC-KB integrates partner data to provide (a) a common terminology for facilitating communication among project partners and (b) a common consistent view for efficient data integration. The PC-KB has been successfully applied in the automation systems domain to improve collaboration and data exchange in heterogeneous engineering environments.