Arquimedes Canedo, Siemens Digital Industries Software, Distinguished Engineer
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a cornerstone of modern engineering, enabling the design, development, and manufacturing of complex products such as cars and airplanes. However, PLM systems grapple with vast and fragmented data. Components like brakes in a car span multiple disciplines (mechanical, electrical, and software), each with unique data models and terminologies. This diversity creates significant challenges for PLM enterprise search, often yielding inconsistent and disconnected results.

This talk presents how ontologies can address these challenges by unifying PLM data models, guiding data extractors, and delivering a consistent search experience across disparate information. We will present how upper, domain-specific, and cross-domain ontologies harmonize data from engineering tools.

Through real-world examples, we will demonstrate the issues faced in PLM search and how ontology-driven solutions provide clarity and cohesion. Additionally, we will present an architecture for a knowledge graph (KG) in a search index, challenging the traditional view that KGs must rely on property graphs or triple stores. This approach enables efficient search using discovery rules and dynamic relationships tailored to evolving data.

Finally, we’ll discuss the organizational challenges of introducing ontologies and knowledge graphs into PLM systems, offering insights into the collaborative process, strategies for success, and lessons learned.