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: , , ,

Gen-Flux and the Inforbix connected enterprise

May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Have you heard about Gen-Flux? Maybe?  Well if you haven’t, here’s what Wikipedia provides as a short intro to Gen-Flux.

Generation Flux is a neologism and psychographic (not demographic) designation for American employees who need to make several changes in career throughout their working lives due to the chaotic nature of the job market following the 2008–2012 global financial crisis. The pace of change has been accelerated by the use of social media, smartphones, mobile computing, and other new technologies.[1]

You can learn more about Gen-Flux by reading these articles I’ve found helpful: Generation flux future of business and Generation flux Pete Cashmore. Here is one of my favorite passages:

He recognizes that the age of Flux can be difficult for some people. “The typical mindset understates the risk of not changing and overstates the risk of change,” he observes. “It’s just a trait of being a human.” But in the big picture, he says, the need for change is overwhelming: “It’s fundamentally a good thing: Human progress is accelerating. As a species, we have so many problems. If we change fast enough, we could solve them before things become disastrous.”

I want to highlight two important characteristics from the Gen-Z story, “Connected” and “Always on Change” and point out that these are also the characteristics of business today. Now, let’s move to Inforbix and manufacturing. Today, manufacturing companies are starting to live the reality and consequences of fast changing markets, demands, and trends.  I’m not about to coin the “Manufacturing-flux” term, but helping manufacturing companies survive today’s fast changing business climates must be an important imperative.

So, how can Inforbix help?  I’ll tell you.  Inforbix does two things relevant to this discussion; fast implementation and seamlessly connecting data silos together. This is where we excel. Our product data crawlers connect data between different departments and people together which in turn helps anyone have access to data that enables good decision support at the right moment in time. Deploying Inforbix takes minutes rather than months.  It involves a simple Wizard assisted download rather than teams of service people.  The results is the Connected Company, a term I’m borrowing from Dion Hinchcliffe along with this picture since it illustrates exactly what Inforbix does to data in manufacturing companies:

Conclusion. Inforbix can help transform your company into a connected network of data with minimum effort.  Thus, you can embarace Gen-Flux with confidence.  Experience Inforbix for yourself.  Demo it today or try it for free on 20,000 files in your company.

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Dachis Group

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Inforbix Tables and the move to intelligent data

May 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I think the word “intelligent” adds a special panache to most anything. It imparts a refreshing “smell” that evokes the impression that something “smart” is involved.  So a move from “dumb” to “intelligent” must be a good move, right? Jos Voskuil would answer “yes” when it comes to moving data towards something more intelligent.  Jos’s lastest post, Dumb Documents or Intelligent Data?, provides what I think is a fair expectation of a move from dumb to intelligent data. Here is an interesting passage from Jos’s post about the potential trouble with dumb data:

Here it was even more a key point of the discussion that most of the legacy data is stored in dumb documents. And the main reason dumb documents are used is because the data needs to be available during the long lifecycle of the the plant, application independent if possible. So in the previous century this was paper, later scanned documents (TIFF – PDF) and currently mainly PDF. Most of the data now is digital but where is the intelligence ?

The challenges these companies have is that despite the fact information is now stored in a digital file, the next step is how to deal with the information in an intelligent manner. A document or an Excel file is a collection of information, you might call in knowledge, but to get access to the knowledge you need to find it.

Did you try to find a specific document in Google docs or SharePoint ? The conclusion will be the file name becomes very important, and perhaps some keywords ?

Jos is talking about “search” as a potential solution to move from “dumb documents” to “intelligent data”.  Jos defines this as a gradual process. The idea of “intelligent data” resonated with me. We are not sure if the tempting moniker of PLM is applicable here. However, I will say that making a painless transition from dumb to intelligent data is both a challenge and objective that is at issue here.  Inforbix, in my view, provides a good answer to the things Jos refers to on his post relating to data capture and presentation done in a meaningful and useful context, i.e. intelligent data.  Here are two examples of how Inforbix helps transition “dumb” to “intelligent” data.  The first example, on a video, shows how Inforbix captures BOM data from within Excel spreadsheets.

The second example illustrates how Inforbix extracts BOM data from within CAD files.

In both examples, Search and reporting using Inforbix Tables, are important elements of the process.  Inforbix gives you the ability to search, find, and access data assets across you company without requiring traditional data management technology or processes.  Inforbix works with data in it’s original location or source.  And with product data apps, it gives users the means to expose data in meaningful and useful ways.

Conclusion. Inforbix helps make the transition of dumb to intelligent data easy and painless.  It does so using semantic technology that exposes useful relationships between disparate sources of data.  Inforbix turns data consumption into a productive and intelligent process without the hassles of traditional data management solutions. See for yourself. Register to use Inforbix on your own data today.  It’s free and painless.

Best, Oleg

Filed Under: Applications, Product Data Stories Tagged With: , , ,

Inforbix, PDM and Self-Organized Data

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Engineering and Manufacturing is a fun place again. Lots of things are going on that make it so: social, cloud, mobile, new business models, etc.  At Inforbix, we love hearing that something fresh and new in manufacturing is coming… especially if it makes it fun for users.  I’ve been reading an interesting article in Chad Jackson’s blog, Is PDM Disruption Ready?.  On the article, Chad talks about PDM and if it’s ready for a change after decades of there being no “next big thing” type of change in PDM.

The last bit of “innovation” that happened in PDM was when it was made into an “add-on” to CAD systems.  In other words, CAD vendors provided their own PDM solutions, often times with some form of mutual coupling or integration between the two.  Chad talks about different aspects of innovation in PDM that he sees. One of these, resonated with me: self organized data. Here is the passage from Chad’s blog that caught my attention:

Self Organizing Data: PDM could learn a lot from Business Intelligence. Analytics? What? I know. I know. At first glance, this doesn’t seem applicable in any way, shape or form. But the enabling capability of this type of software that is intriguing is the ability to extract structure out of data when there is no explicit data structure. Essentially, the data that needs to be managed by PDM needs to be associated with the ‘right stuff.’ All that is done manually today. But with a little smarter software, there might be no need for the user to do that explicitly at all.

At this moment in the industry, self organizing data looks like an interesting option for PDM. It removes much of the complexity inherent with “managing data”.  Inforbix’s approach is to “re-think” product data access which involves Inforbix’s ability to crawl, scan and index data from most data sources (e.g. CAD, excel, PDF, PLM, ERP, etc) and locations.  Read more, in Chad’s own words, his explanation of how Inforbix works, here.  He does a great job of explaining how Inforbix enables data access using our scanning/indexing technology, leaving data in it’s original location and source.  Also, here’s a video we produced that explains how Inforbix works:

Conclusion. We think the ideas on PDM that Chad mentioned in his post and the Inforbix technologies (e.g. semantic technology, cloud, mobile) available today are mutually complimentary. If you follow this blog, you may have had a chance to see what we have cooking in the back-burner, go here.  Continue to follow our blog to learn more.  And if  you get a chance, try Inforbix using our test-drive demo.

Best, Oleg

Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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How Inforbix supports social networks and frictionless information sharing

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In addition to enjoying exceptionally warm Boston weather this weekend (see pics here), I’ve been catching up on some social reading during this past weekend. Two articles from Gartner caught my attention. Search and Enterprise Social Networks and  Frictionless Sharing and the enterprise social network. The ideas shared in these two articles resonated with the way Inforbix enables information sharing in manufacturing organizations.  The following passage is one of my favorites:

As multiple business applications become integrated with a social network site, a significant challenge will be the normalization of business entities across applications. For example, aligning a customer record in a CRM system with the same customer record in a warranty claims system. Without this alignment, cross-business application relationships cannot be captured within the site’s social graph and workers participating in the network will see duplicate customer profiles (one from the CRM system, the other from the warranty claims system).

Many of these information aggregation challenges are not new. They share similar qualities to those being addressed by today’s enterprise search solutions (as well as data warehouse applications). Now, I am not talking about the simple keyword search, but rather search-based applications that aggregate information across multiple sources of business information. These applications often offer rich navigation methods for exploring the information and finding previously unseen relationships.

The wide adoption of social networks provides an interesting perspective on info sharing, especially for smaller manufacturing companies.  Whereas large companies have many options at their disposal, smaller companies can use simple and affordable ideas to innovate.  And social networks are both an affordable and effective way to go.  However, the challenge of sharing information across the company remains a complicated task. Data management solutions and techniques are well known yet are a complicated and expensive way to go.

Inforbix proposes a different approach.  Inforbix scans and indexes data in it’s original location from multiple places in your company such as drawings, files, CAD models, excels files, etc. By making this information available, Inforbix make it possible to share information within your company’s social network such as SharePoint, Jive, etc. That’s because Inforbix follows exactly same ideas and principles as social networks, i.e.,  aggregating information located in multiple places.  Here’s a video with an example related to a typical work-flow.

Conclusion: Inforbix simplifies data sharing in companies by making the process of doing so seamless and without causing friction.  Give it a try in your company. Register today. There is no risk, the first 20,000 files scanned are free and installation of the data crawlers takes only a few minutes.

Best, Oleg

image credit sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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

How Inforbix can simplify legacy data import

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

There is one project in data management I believe everybody tries to avoid: legacy data import. Let’s face it, it’s one of the most complicated, time consuming, and painful aspects of any data management project deployment. Legacy data import usually lead to tons of related problems such as how to map data to a new or existing system, how to import data physically, how to validate that all data has been imported done, and how to teach other people to use and access data in the new system.

Enterprise systems and vendors have plenty of tools and recommendations on how to do it. Yet it’s never easy and usually involves an outsource service team to deploy and implement. Even the most “modern” of data management solutions require data imports.  By their nature, data management requires data and that data has to be imported into the data management system.  But is there a better way? Yes, we think so.

At Inforbix we place significant focus on the simplicity of acquiring data which we think, can help avoid or greatly reduce the pain of legacy data imports. Inforbix uses product data crawlers to scan and index data in its original location and source.  It does so seamlessly and without any effort or involvement from anyone.  Legacy data, included in the Inforbix scan, simply become data that is exposed and made available automatically without actually touching it.  Let me give you one example of legacy data: Excel spreadsheets containing BOM information.  With Inforbix, all Excel files are scanned and index in their original location.  Using Inforbix Search, one of several Inforbix apps, you can locate the exact Excel worksheet you need and convert it into a virtual spreadsheet using Inforbix Tables.  This now makes it possible for you view, share and modify columns and column names without actually touching the original worksheet.  You have access to legacy BOM data and are able to do something useful with it without having touched or move the original Excel file.

Conclusion.  Inforbix simplifies how data is accessed.  It takes a new approach that is seamless and easy because it doesn’t require touching or importing data in order to make it available to anyone in a manufacturing company.  Give Inforbix a try and let us know what you think.  Register to use it on your data or give it a try using or own data set using our test-drive demo.

Best, Oleg

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

How to get from product IP to the right data

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Data is one of the things we are passionate about at Inforbix.  Data is in our DNA.  Think for a moment how your daily life would be affected without modern data tools such as Google, social maps, social nets, etc. How miserable (or disoriented) would your life be without these sources of information?  Now, imagine similar for a manufacturing company. The amount of data and information is huge and the ability to get at the right data is both complicated and challenging, in my view. You have tons of databases, files, excels, applications, and other sources of data generation and storage. When you need it, what is the right data and how do you access it?

I’ve been reading an interesting article by GigaOM, it is not the big data, it is right data.  Here is my favorite passage:

”When you represent data in traditional relational databases, you can compromise the inherent nature of the data. And if you integrate a lot of data together, ultimately that data looks like a large array. Representing an array in a traditional database is really an unnatural act,” he said.

So how does this relate to Inforbix? you may ask. Here’s how: Inforbix is going “beyond” databases, excels, CAD files, and the like by connecting all these data assets in a network of information that is intuitively exposed using product data apps. By applying indexing and additional semantic functions, Inforbix helps you get to the right data quickly and easily.

Conclusion. Our passion is to simplify the way engineers and other people in manufacturing companies access the data they need and do something useful with it. Access to the right data at the time you need. Give our test drive demo or register to use Inforbix on your data for free.

Best, Oleg

picture credit renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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

Product data and the notion of similarity

May 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you live the life of a young company (as we do), you may find yourself in an environment where you’re always trying to stay ahead of the “next big thing”. Right now, most people consider the next big thing to be in social, cloud, mobile, 3d printing. I’ve been reading an interesting article on the T.N.T blog, The Next Big Thing. The post talks about Amazon’s plans to help identify “similar groups of people” based on their consumption patterns on Amazon (specifically, base on their book readership knowledge base). I found the following passage fascinating:

“It is what we specifically find interesting and useful in those books that reveals deep similarities between people – the hi-lites, bookmarks and the notes will be the connectors. Our choices reveal who we are, and who we are like! Today, Amazon introduces you to similar books.  Tomorrow, they will introduce you to similar readers.”

The idea of “similar readers” made me think about “similarity” within manufacturing, product data, and what Inforbix is all about: connecting diverse sets of product data together.  But let me take it step-by-step.  If you are in the engineering world, you probably are very familiar with the topic of “interchangeability”. If you’re not familiar with this term, navigate to the following wikipedia article.  At the same time, the definition of interchangeable parts is very complex. There are multiple factors that can be used to define “interchangeability”, such as form, fit and function. The complex definition of “interchangeable” parts can lead to the topic of similarity or the ability to find similar elements of product data.

Inforbix develops products that understand the notion of similarity between different product data.  These similarities are represented in data snippets which include drawings, assemblies, models, excel spreadsheets, and pdf files. The idea of data similarity is based on a specific set of expandable rules (some of them we define and some of them can be expanded). Inforbix identifies and analyze these elements of data and organizes them into a data snippet with links to related or connected data.

Here are two examples of product data snippets created by Inforbix.  Note the links which connect to other related data such as references, tables, parts, drawing BOM, and related files such as AutoCAD and PDFs.

Conclusion. Inforbix develops mechanisms that automatically expose and establish connections between “similar elements” of product data. It helps user find and discover related information quickly. It also simplifies the process of work related to “interchangeable” elements by providing users the ability to navigate between disparate sources of related information.
How much product data is spread across your company?  Would Inforbix help you?  Find out by registering to use Inforbix on your data.

Best, Oleg
Filed Under: Product Data Stories Tagged With: , ,

Inforbix and Product Data Tsunami

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Have your heard about the new buzz in the town?  Well, the new buzz is Big Data.   What started as a low hum 2 – 3 years ago is turning into major buzz today.  Mention of Big Data is appearing with growing frequency in manufacturing and, more specifically, in the context of product lifecycle.  I’ve been reading a CIMdata article, Analytics, PLM Converge Amid Data Tsunami; A Ceaseless Search for Sustainable Advantage.  In the article, CIMdata talks about the drivers increasing the amount of data in & out of manufacturing companies and the way PLM vendors address this. The following passage is my favorite:

Finding this kind of information requires patience plus skills in organizational structures, digital networks and databases. Uncovering hidden connections among seemingly unrelated items-the more important value proposition-requires powerful analytics tools. These tools are a focus of much development in areas such as ad-hoc report formats, key performance indicators (KPIs) to help keep searches relevant, and customizable dashboards. 

The new dashboards generate intuitive, easily understood visuals for busy decision makers and help ascertain that only current, verified information is being navigated. Dashboard innovations also help align business processes with real-time as well as archived data. 

Structured data, in contrast, is less voluminous (also according to IDC), somewhat slower growing and much easier to handle. Spreadsheets are a prime example of structured data; data in rows and columns is easily searched, retrieved, parsed, and reformatted. Also comparatively easy to search are text-based files and e-mail.

I found some very interesting messages which resonated with what we are doing at Inforbix. Namely, the use of connected information, dashboards with verified information, and the ubiquitous use of spreadsheets. Inforbix can do something special with all three messages which resonated.  It crawls and scans on-premise data from any source or location and can retrieve and expose this data using a web-browser.

With regards to verified information, Inforbix can automatically update and monitor live on-premise information and present that to the user using Dashboards.

Last, but not least, Inforbix provides a unique way to convert unstructured data in Excel spreadsheets into structured information that is always current.

Conclusion. Inforbix is well prepared to help companies handle the growing amount of structured product data (eg. CAD, PDM, PLM) and less structured content (eg. Excel spreadsheets). The efficiency and ease of use of Inforbix makes it applicable to small engineering firms and manufacturing companies.  Give Inforbix a try on your own data or demo it yourself using our own data set.  Do it today!

Best, Oleg

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

Inforbix experiments with SpaceClaim file type support

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

At Inforbix, we’re always looking for ways to make it easy for our users to access data from different file types and sources.  Navigate to our supported data sources page to learn what data types Inforbix currently supports. Right now, we are experimenting with supporting file types from SpaceClaim.  I’d like to share with you some screen shots of our progress thus far of our experiments with SpaceClaim:

This is a screen shot of an Inforbix Search result for all .scdoc documents in our experimental SpaceClaim data set:

This screen shot features an individual data snippet of a .scdoc.  Notice how Inforbix provides useful links to related information, e.g. Parts Table, a related AutoCAD file, etc.

On this screenshot, we’ve navigated to the Parts Table link on the data snippet above and present the resulting table data snippet.  Inforbix can extract table information from the .scdoc file which can be tabulated and monitored for changes by the user using Inforbix Tables or Dashboard.

The final screenshot I want to share is a tabular report of all SpaceClaim docs created by Inforbix Tables with useful information such as Creating Date, Modified [date], etc.

Conclusion.  Inforbix technology is open and flexible making it capable of supporting a wide variety of data types and sources.  Product data apps give users the ability to access, expose, report, and monitor their data across data sources and information silos.  We hope you find our experiment with SpaceClaim interesting.  What do you think?  Would adding SpaceClaim support to Inforbix be helpful to you?  Let us know.  Also, if you get a chance, try our test-drive demo.

Best,  Oleg

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