Product Life-Cycle Metadata Modeling and Its Application with RDF

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 19; no. 12; pp. 1680 - 1693
• Main Authors: Hong-Bae Jun, Kiritsis, D., Xirouchakis, P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.12.2007; IEEE Computer Society; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; Data engineering; Data models; Data processing. List processing. Character string processing; Database languages; End of life; Engineering management; Exact sciences and technology; Information systems. Data bases; Internet; Knowledge management; Life cycle engineering; Mathematical models; Memory organisation. Data processing; Metadata; Product life cycle; Radiofrequency identification; Resource description framework; Software; Studies; Technology management; Telecommunications; Three phase; XML/XSL/RDF; metadata; XML/XSL/RDF; Data models; Knowledge engineering; Engineering information systems; Data design and management; emerging technologies; Query language; Metadata; Resource description framework; Modeling; Product data management PDM; Data flow; Data flow processing; Life cycle; knowledge and data engineering tools and techniques; query languages; Storage management; Wireless network; By product; Mobile computing
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2007.190661

The whole product life cycle consists of three phases: beginning of life (BOL), middle of life (MOL), and end of life (EOL). Although large amounts of product life-cycle data are generated over the whole product life cycle, data flows are rather vague after BOL. Over the last decade, however, emerging Internet, wireless mobile telecommunications, and product identification technologies have created the potential of making the whole product life cycle visible. As a result, the scope of data to be managed has expanded over the whole product life cycle. Hence, it becomes important to describe product life-cycle metadata in a systematic manner. Although much attention has been paid to data modeling over several objects such as products and processes, modeling methodology for product life-cycle metadata is not well developed. To cope with this limitation, we develop a modeling method for product life-cycle metadata by using the resource description framework (RDF). We define an RDF data model and its schema for describing and managing product life-cycle metadata. In addition, we describe how the proposed RDF model can be usefully applied to track, trace, and infer product life-cycle data with an RDF query language.