Semantic exploitation of persistent metadata in engineering models: Application to geological models

Engineering models are computer-based models that enclose technical data issued from engineering domains. Those models usually implicit many of the details required to understand and interpret the data. In this context, integrating the results of models and querying the heterogeneous information is a challenge. In order to address the issue of handling heterogeneous models, we propose to annotate the engineering models with concepts of the ontologies of the specific engineering domains. We describe here the proposal of a semantic annotation meta-model, which extends an ontology-based database architecture with constructs that allow to tag engineering models using ontology concepts. This work is inspired from a petroleum engineering case study, and we validate our approach by presenting an implementation of this case.