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I attended the INCOSE International Workshop 2018 to present Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and to engage with leaders in the systems engineering community. I had the opportunity to present OSLC on 3 different days in these 3 different sessions:

• Tool Integration and Model Management Working Group
• Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Initiative & Systems Engineering (SE) Transformation
• Systems Modeling and Simulation Working Group

I was very glad to see strong interest in the systems engineering community for OSLC, a key technology to achieve the Digital thread.

My main OSLC presentation was given to the MBSE Initiative & SE Transformation Working Group. It can be found on slideshare, as well as on OMG MBSE wiki containing references to other, mostly downloadable, presentations from that working group.

My OSLC presentation was intended for a large audience with possibly little technical background. The intent was to explain key OSLC concepts by comparing them to familiar World Wide Web concepts. I was told several times that this kind of introduction to OSLC is very understandable. It is similar to the OSLC presentation that I gave for the recent Jama webinar which can be viewed by signing up.

Among the other presentations was an overview of the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) v2 which included a slide on the importance of integrating systems engineering information with other domains.

I was excited to learn about a new “Semantic Technologies for Systems Engineering” (ST4SE) initiative led by NASA JPL. More about this initiative can be found in this project description. An important industry representative shared with me his interesting idea to combine the ST4SE ontologies with the OSLC Configuration Management specification for RDF version-management at a global level. We would be very excited to participate in such an effort.

In general, the relatively new OSLC Configuration Management specification is drawing a lot of attention. I heard a lot of interest to link ALM and PLM information using a common global configuration management approach. I was told at the INCOSE IW that the current OSLC Configuration Management specification concepts would not easily map one-to-one to PLM configuration management concepts. As this topic needs to be addressed successfully in order to allow a broader adoption of OSLC, covering important domains such as PLM, my team at Koneksys will investigate this question very shortly.

Stay tuned!

Axel