You are here: Home / Archives for Friday Data Stories

Friday Data Story: Manufacturing Ontologies and Semantic Web

May 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s been awhile since I last posted a “Friday Data Story”. These usually present a topic that expand the “data” horizons of software use and also provide a bit more perspective. The topic of “ontologies” has already been discussed on this blog.  Navigate to Inforbix Product Data Semantics if you need a reminder as a starting point to today’s post. “Ontology” may sound complex, but it actually represents a simple concept: the semantics of data.  The following workshop material caught my attention a few weeks ago, Ontology and Semantic Web for manufacturing. The workshop will take place in Gratz, Austria on the 24th of July.  You can find more information here.  Here’s a description of the workshop that hopefully provides you a glimpse of what the workshop is about:

Developing innovative and competitive products in the globalized world requires an orchestrated Product Life Cycle Management (PLM). To achieve this, we require more that enterprise policies and good human-based communication channels, appropriate technologies are also mandatory. These technologies should be able to support representing, managing and reusing the PLM knowledge, same as inferring implicit knowledge in large and geographically distributed knowledgebases. Some of the just mentioned requirements, related with knowledge, are considered in Ontology and the Semantic Web framework. That is causing an increasing interest in using them into the manufacturing domain.

Design for Manufacturing (DfM), Concurrent Engineering (CE) and Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) are modern manufacturing approaches in which the search of orchestration becomes evident. Although there have been some research aiming to integrate Ontology and the Semantic Web with them, there is still the necessity of methodologies, frameworks, software  tools and more use cases to support industrial implementations.

For the page that caught my special attention go here. These questions grabbed my interest and resonated with what we are doing at Inforbix.  The questions are:

- How can semantic search be deployed over the manufacturing information space?
- How can tagging techniques be applied within the manufacturing domain?
- A CAD ontology per standard? Or a CAD upper ontology?
- Do we need one enterprise ontology or modular enterprise ontology?

Inforbix Search is especially developed for the manufacturing information domain, e.g., for multiple files, databases, and applications.  We developed technology that use manufacturing ontologies and other data management techniques to work with complex semantically rich data such as CAD files.

Conclusion. I’m looking forward to attending the workshop if time permits and see how Inforbix can provide some answers to the questions I pointed out, above.  The good news is, you can get some practical use of Inforbix right away. Demo Inforbix today or start a pilot at your company using your own data, register today!

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , , ,

SolidWorks Data, simplicity and historical reflections

February 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It is easy to create something complex. It is very hard to create something simple.  History proves it over and over again.  A few days ago, I stumbled on a very old press release (I cannot even call it blog post) from around10 years ago (thanks Google!). Navigate your browser to the following link to read SolidWorks Brings Real-Time Online Collaboration to the Design Review Process.  The article talks about development work done by SolidWorks many years ago – 3D TeamWorks. Here is my favorite passage:

The typical product designer endures a costly waiting game after faxing, mailing, overnight shipping, or even hand-delivering designs to get comments and approval from everyone in the design review process. 3D TeamWorks eliminates the headaches of traditional design reviews by providing a secure, interactive forum for engineers to share 2D and 3D CAD files in multiple formats with parts suppliers, customers, and internal reviewers on the fly. This accelerated design review shortens the entire product design cycle so companies can bring their products to market faster….While other collaboration tools only operate on specific file formats, the integrated formatting capability in 3D TeamWorks gives design review teams the flexibility to use many popular CAD formats. All users need is a standard Web browser and an Internet connection. 3D TeamWorks also allows project team members to share non-CAD files such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG, PDF, and engineering support documents.

What is most amazing to me is that not much has changed since; engineers must continue to endure the costly waiting game. Last week, during SolidWorks World 2012 in San Diego, I caught some chatter on SolidWorks n!Fuze product. I think the people that talked to me about n!Fuze could have easily been relating the same contents of that 10 year old article.  The context is the same.

The article and its historical reflection resonated with many of the ideas we have at Inforbix. The notion of having the ability to share data easily, accessing data in a transparent way is something that we like. Inforbix product data apps are designed to eliminate from users (designers, engineers, and others in a mfg company) the need to install, configure, and maintain anything.  That’s due to the maturity of the cloud technologies used by Inforbix.  And how we combine the cloud with our own product data semantic technology to make it easy for users to find, reusing, and share data using apps that access, report, chart, and monitor data.

Learn more about Inforbix apps by navigating to our Product Page.  And I’d like to encourage you to test drive Inforbix today.

Best, Oleg
Filed Under: Friday Data Stories, News Tagged With: , , ,

Friday Data Stories: Openness and the Semantic Web For Manufacturing

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s been a few weeks since my last Friday data story. That’s probably because we’ve been busy with other topics such as talking about new stuff, e.g. Inforbix on iPad and Inforbix Dashboard app, and use cases that reflect what we’re learning from our customers, e.g. How to share Bill of Materials from CAD and How to re-use CAD data without “discipline”.  With today’s Friday data story, I’d like to get back on track. The following publication is about OSEMA 2012  which caught my attention a few days ago. I found it interesting and relevant with what Inforbix is doing.

The OSEMA Workshop (Ontology and Semantic Web for Manufacturing) focuses on research related to semantic technology, web,  and the manufacturing industry.  OSEMA 2012 is part of FOIS 2012 (International Conference on Formal ontologies in information systems). As you can learn from the website:

Developing innovative and competitive products in the globalized world requires an orchestrated Product Life Cycle Management (PLM). To achieve this, we require more that enterprise policies and good human-based communication channels, appropriate technologies are also mandatory. These technologies should be able to support representing, managing and reusing the PLM knowledge, same as inferring implicit knowledge in large and geographically distributed knowledgebases…. Ontologies have been used to model products and more recently other resources (machine-tools). In the same way, as we drew up above, the Semantic Web could support the work flow and decision making in the PLM, enabling  automatic information retrieval and reasoning…Although some approaches of this kind have been proposed, none of them are widely accepted and tested so far, which means that there are still several issues requiring extensive discussion and consensus in the community. 

I took a deeper look at the site and found an interesting set of questions and issues addressed by the workshop. Navigate to the following link to learn more.  Here are some of the questions I’m referring too:

- A CAD ontology per standard? Or a CAD upper ontology?
- Semantic search over the manufacturing information space.
- How can the versioning of products be managed? Can ontology help? How?

The website provides a link to the previous workshop (OSEMA 2011) . Navigate there and take a look at the materials from those proceedings. I found them interesting, you may also find them such.  One of the publications - Linking Data for Industrial Knowledge management resonated. Here is the passage about “making data searchable” that I especially liked:

In its original form, the underlying data is sorted and searched for according to a hierarchical classification of the individual power plant projects. As a result, it is not easily accessible to human users with complex access needs, such as, searching for a project documentation based on the personnel involvement. Browsing through a spreadsheet file with a lot of columns, makes it hard for a user to see the possible connections that exist between the projects. By transforming the data dumps into RDF form and making them compatible with each other, we managed to create a network of data, which allows for the data’s information to be used to its full potential. Because of this, complex and perchance unexpected connections in the data can be found.

What is Inforbix’s take? The material and ideas presented at the OSEMA workshops resonate with some of our own philosophical and technological principles. For example, the reliance on open standards and technology – that really resonates. One often hears vendors paying lip service to openness. However, it’s actually adopting the principles and technology discussed at places like the OSEMA workshops along with open web standards and semantic technology that demonstrate actual commitment to helping customers make better use of their data.  We believe Inforbix provides leapfrog technology that embraces what OSEMA is all about.  Find out for yourself if our claim is more than that.  Give Inforbix a test drive.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , , , ,

Friday data stories: Taking data in manufacturing company seriously

December 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Companies are run on processes.  Processes make it possible (and probable) that good things can be repeated and bad things avoided. If you talk to business and IT execs, and other influential people in manufacturing companies, they will tell you that processes are absolutely necessary without which there would be no growth or viability in the face of competitive and macro economic pressure.

For years, enterprise software providers took advantage of this sentiment and built big companies selling software primarily focused on processes.  I’m sure you can come up with a few examples.

But, do you think this bias for processes will last?  I sense some changes coming in companies that suggest processes will be supplanted in importance by data.  Take Big Data.  It’s one of those interesting trends we continue hearing more about each day.  On a previous post I wrote that product data is big data. Back then, I gave an example I still stand behind,

Here’s another example of horizontal scale Big Data: imagine you have a process spanning multiple vertical systems (PDM, ERP, CRM). The ability to identify all information linked to this process can be an interesting and useful task. This is a typical example of horizontal big data that I believe would be relevant to manufacturing companies. 

Earlier this week, I was reading a Forbes article, How Big Data Came to PepsiCo.  Diego Saenz, founder of Data Driven CEO, talks about a data project at PepsiCo and the reasons why PepsiCo decided to take on the data challenge. Among the reasons mentioned, was competitive pressure.  Here’s my favorite quote from the article:

The biggest benefit came from combining customer level data with other data–in particular logistics and manufacturing information. Combining sales and distribution data with logistics and manufacturing improved the plant operations in some very significant ways.

The other interesting point made in the article had to do with the huge difference between how companies amassing data versus how they actually use data.  Here’s the passage:

Businesses often find it much easier to amass huge quantities of data than it is to find meaning in it. Any advice on how to go about looking for meaning in the sort of data that you’ve collected?

Most companies have a long way to go in this area as data is often a highly underutilized asset. CEOs and CMOs cannot be content with just “having” data but must challenge themselves and their people to use the data. This is hard because it requires discipline and a serious commitment of time and effort Finding meaning is not a straightforward task–it’s about making connections that are not obvious.

What do we think at Inforbix? Connecting disparate islands of data together resonates with us.  It’s something we fervently believe is essential for driving innovation and making great decisions.  Inforbix deploys technology that helps link islands of data together in manufacturing companies.  Our approach is to offer a simple and affordable means of data access regardless of source or location.  By doing so, we think people in manufacturing companies will take better advantage of all their data, big and small.  Have a great weekend.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , ,

Friday Data Story: Big data, social and consumerization

December 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

Consumer technologies are making their way into the enterprise.  There’s even a buzzword for it: consumerization.  Here’s a list of examples (from Quora) that span the last five years:

2007:

RSS, Profiles, Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums as an integrated platform (Wikipedia, WordPress, Typepad, Newsgator, Friendfeed)
Instant Messaging/Presence (Gmail)
Actual use of LinkedIn for recruiting
Point Systems/Levels (World of Warcraft)
Ratings (Amazon)

2008:
Video (YouTube!)
Social Bookmarking (Del.ici.ous)
Social Networking (Facebook, LinkedIn)

2009:
Microblogging (Twitter)
Mobile (meaning smart phones like iPhone)
Cloud Delivery (Google, Facebook, Everyone)
Actual use of Twitter for marketing

2010:
Tablets (iPad)
Standards (OpenSocial)
Badging to drive user behavior (Zynga)
Actual use of Facebook for marketing
Infrastructure like Cassandra, Voldemort, Hadoop (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google)

2011:
Interactive Video/Voice (Skype)
Integrated Inbox (Threadsy)
Long Tail App Marketplaces (iTunes/Android)
Auth Standards (xAuth, OpenID, SAML2)
Location Based Awareness/Support for Mobile (FourSquare)
Social Graph based filtering/intelligence (Facebook)

All things “Social” are trending.  We all know the huge impact it has had in consumer sectors.  Now companies, big and small, are looking at ways to harness the advantages of social technologies or products by adapting it within their organizations.  Which reminds me… I read an interesting IT Business Edge blog article earlier this week, Big Data Meets Social Networking in the Enterprise. The article discusses how social networks are impacting the utility of big data (another trending topic, btw) within companies.  Here’s my favorite passage:

The next challenge IT organizations will face in terms of making the information actionable, says Smith, is applying analytics to the trove of data they can now more easily collect. To accomplish that, Smith says IT organizations should start moving to organize that information around metadata constructs that will make it easier to identify trends and correlate disparate sources of information. 

That passage made me stop and think about the growing trend of gathering data from many different sources in the enterprise and making it easier for people to understand and better yet, to make data actionable.  In my opinion, it leads to better decision-making.  And better decisions increase the chance of good results and success.

There is, in my mind, a direct association with how social, big data, and consumerization have converged and with the approach Inforbix takes.  We have a laser focus on “product data”.  And product data is big data.  Our ability to access product data located across CAD, PDM, PLM, ERP and other data sources is growing.  And we are using principles and technologies picked up from the consumer space (e.g. semantics, simple user interface, easy to install and use, affordable).   We want to help manufacturing companies make better use of their product data and possibly, make better decisions.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , , ,

Friday Data Stories: Microsoft Data Explorer and Product Data Mashups

December 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A data mashup from multiple sources is fascinating and can also be a very effective way of digesting data from various sources. At Inforbix, have data in our DNA; we believe in the huge value and benefit that can data brings to people. As of late, businesses are discovering a ‘better’ way to work with data using tools available on the cloud.  Apropos, earlier this week, the following Microsoft Azure cloud project caught my attention: Microsoft Data Explorer. Have a read to get more information.  What specifically caught my eye are the following MDE capabilities, which I found interesting:

Identify the data you care about from the sources you work with (e.g.Excels, files, SQL Server dbs).
Discover relevant data and services via automatic recommendations from the Win Azure Market.
Enrich your data by combining it and visualizing the results.
Collaborate with your colleagues to refine the data.
Publish the results to share them with others or power solutions

You might also be interested to watch the following two videos to learn more about MDE.

The story of Microsoft Data Explorer on the Azure cloud resonated. That’s because Inforbix is always thinking of how to make people’s lives easier in manufacturing companies.  But I should add that in addition to the cloud, we do believe the real power of data is best manifested when accompanied by a deep understanding of the semantics (or meaning) between different sets of data.  In our case, it is all about product data, e.g. CAD drawings, 3D models, bill of materials, spec sheets, and the like. Inforbix’s cloud based apps help you to identify, preview, find, merge and organize data using the power of data semantics.

Think of it this way: Inforbix provides meaningful data mashups that make it easy for everyone in an organization to access and make the best possible use of data. If you want to learn more about Inforbix navigate to the following link.  And discover how Inforbix can help your company make effective use of data by using it for free.  Have a great weekend!

Best, Oleg

 

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , , ,

Friday Data Stories: Uber, Crime and the power of data

November 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Las Vegas (no, it’s not what you think; I’m going to AU) I was checking into what’s new in transportation alternatives and perhaps avoid taking a taxi. As such, something I have always wanted to try is Uber, an interesting online service you can request using a smartphone.  Check  out their site for more details.  BTW, unfortunately the Inforbix “garage” is outside the current Uber coverage zone in Boston.  Oh, well…

Checking Uber out, however, reminded me of an article from Uber’s blog I had a chance to read a couple of weeks ago, Uberdata: how prostitution and alcohol made uber better.  Yes, I know, it’s quite an unusual topic, at least for this blog. The keyword that caught my attention on the post was “data”. If you want to know more about an unusual use of data, then this is a “must read” article for you. Uber folks are running some very interesting analysis of data related to uber services in multiple cities and coming to some fascinating conclusions. Here is my favorite quote: 

This finding is a perfect example of the fascinating insights you can get when you combine big, seemingly disparate datasets. By trying to figure out how to predict where to position our cars, we got a peek at the ebb and flow of the life and crimes of San Francisco. Expect more of these kinds of posts in the next couple of weeks.

Conclusion. I want to make a conclusion relating to “combining data sets”. This is an interesting thing we like to do.  Inforbix is not focusing on crime.  However, the ineffective way many manufacturing companies use data is very close to a crime. At inforbix we are trying to help people improve their access to product data. We are going to come up with some useful examples of how Inforbix can combine multiple data sets together. Keep your eyes on this space. For now, I’d like to wish my US-based readers an enjoyable long weekend.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , ,

Friday Data Stories: PLM, ALM and Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration

November 18, 2011 By 3 Comments

Integration is a never-ending story. When companies have heterogeneous systems, data sources and environments, the topic of integration always comes up.  The following activity caught my attention some time ago and I wanted to share and dig into some details, Product Lifecycle Management and Application Lifecycle Management Integration. Navigate to this link to see main wiki page.

The formal definition of the activity (as you can read on this page) is:

The OSLC PLM workgroup brings people together who have a common interest in defining specifications that enable lifecycle collaboration and integration around ALM in the context of PLM, to inform an existing OSLC specification, or contribute new specifications.

Take a look at the following picture presenting the OSLC scope:

If you haven’t had a chance to learn about OSLC, I suggest you spend a few minutes during the coming weekend.  Also, watch the following video that explains OSLC in a nutshell. Then navigate to this website to learn more.

Now let’s get back to PLM and the ALM integration workgroup. I found some interesting things there.  Because it relies on OSLC, Linked Data is in the DNA of these activities. It wraps legacy data in RDFs making a path to the semantic web ontology language (OWL).  See this pic:

Take a look at the following IBM Rational presentation, OSLC in a PLM context. This is the very thing that is gaining traction with various scenarios related to product development.  See this picture:

What is my conclusion? We at Inforbix are focusing on product data and how to make it available for people in manufacturing companies. Some of the concepts and underlying technologies of OSLC and specifically, PLM and the ALM working group, sound very interesting and resonate with our philosophy. What I especially like is the focus on openness and linked data. This sounds as a right path to the future.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , , ,

Friday Data Stories: Inforbix and Recollection of Data

November 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

Today I would like to talk about the project that caught my attention some time ago – Recollection. Navigate to the following Semanticweb link to read more. Recollection is a service which is provided by the small outfit Zepheira. I had a chance to meet Zepheira people and Eric Miller some time ago and had multiple discussions about how the world of data needs to change in the future. The one thing I liked about Eric’s view is a passion about how data can be easily shared between people in a meaningful way.

Getting back to a story of Recollection. What is Recollection in a nutshell? The following passage from the semanticweb.com article explains it well:

Imagine a situation where a scientific researcher is trying to organize a variety of material for a project or paper; that material might be coming from various sources, in various formats, and with shifting context throughout. There might be related research papers (citations and references), contact information for peer researchers, information about organizations who have sponsored the research with grants or research budget, the actual scientific data collected during the research, and more.

Zepheira applied some interesting methods with roots in semantic web technologies (i.e. RDF) and used a set of open source tools to provide an online service focused on the creation of a digital collection that helps solve data problems in the Library of Congress. You can read more here. From the article:

The Recollection approach is to provide a library of services designed to harmonize and enhance data elements for sharing and viewing, while providing a user interface for annotating patterns that support interpretation of the data elements. For example, the user can select a map-plotting service and select a set of spreadsheet columns that express a location  name, which can then be geocoded. The Web services design is key to supporting reuse of such services, which are engineered to work in context of the data set identifiers and relationships.

Watch the following video to see more about Recollection features.

Recollection Video

 

Conclusion. You may be wondering how Recollection related to Inforbix? Here is the reason why I found this story inspiring. It contains two fundamental things Inforbix shares – the focus on specific data with optimized technology and providing a way to share most current data making it available to other people. Inforbix is focused on product data which is our specialty and which we believe we are good at.  We are also focusing on applying and optimizing the best technology developed on the web and for the web and we are providing tools that are user friendly and even enjoyable to use (yes fun… and why not?).

Have a good weekend!

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , , ,

Friday Data Story: Extracting attribute information from product data

November 6, 2011 By 4 Comments

This weeks’ data story is about attributes.  By attributes I mean those that tell me something about the product data in my company I may require to get some task done.  Attributes tell me all sorts of things about product data.  They tell me much, actually.  For example, attributes tell me the name of a particular source file (e.g. a CAD file), its location(s), when it was created and by whom, when it was last modified and by whom, when was it last saved and by whom, it’s physical characteristics, etc etc.  Accessing the attributes of a particular file, especially if you happen to know where it is, will not cause anyone much effort.  However, product data, as we often like to say here, is complicated; and it’s spread out amongst different sources and locations in a manufacturing company.  Therefore the attributes of a particular file may be spread out among various versions or revisions of a particular source file.  Or an assembly or part might be known or identified differently by different departments or divisions.  Or certain relevant physical characteristics of a particular or component are captured amongst several different but related documents.

I believe for most people, having a simple means for aggregating all the relevant attributes for a particular piece of product data would be very useful.  It would, at the very least, help people better understand their product data and make the best use of it.  We’ve given attributes much thought at Inforbix and believe that having a simple means of gathering and viewing all the relevant attributes of a particular piece of product data will be of much value to people.  So we included the ability for people to do so.  I’ll share some pictures with you to illustrate what I mean.

Here are the results using Inforbix Search (one of our apps) for a particular latch bolt.  Note that on the far right within each snippetis a link called “All attributes”.

If you click on this link, Inforbix returns a consolidated list of all known attributes for the particular product data in the snippet.  Here’s a screen shot of the pop-up window listing all known attributes for the “latch bolt.sldprt”.

You’ll note that there are quite a number of attributes captured for just a single piece of product data (a latch bolt).  Inforbix has even picked up miscellaneous but potentially very useful information on the supplier (“Sunshine Metals”) and what looks like the project name it belongs too (“aero marine”).  What Inforbix has done is aggregate all the known attributes together and presented them within a single click.

Conclusion.  Attributes can be a very useful source of product data information.  Inforbix automatically collects and aggregates attributes for any piece of product data and presents it on demand.  What do you think?  Would having access to attribute information be helpful?  How would you make use of them?  Let us know and share your thoughts with us.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Friday Data Stories Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts