At the September 18 OSLC Community Webcast Mike Loeffler fielded many questions about the Proof of Concept integration between IBM Rational Team Concert and Siemens Teamcenter he built with his team at General Motors. While you’ll find the questions answered in the recording (see this YouTube playlist), we thought it worthwhile to bring all the questions and answers together for easy reference. If you want to ask more questions about the integration please post to the related forum thread.
Q1. Did this POC have the Teamcenter client use any OSLC resources? That is, from Teamcenter, could a user see resources in RTC?
Mike Loeffler (ML): Not through OSLC exactly, since the Teamcenter client was not modified to support the delegated UI. We did devise a way to create links to arbitrary URI's in Teamcenter using their Web Link item, which could point to an RTC object but the creation of the URI was manual in our connector web interface.
Q2. Is RDF part of OSLC or a chosen representation for this Proof of Concept?
ML: See the OSLC Overview in the Core V2 specification, but the short answer is that RDF (Resource Description Framework) is the standard specified by OSLC to represent the resources being served. RDF is a W3C linked data standard in its own right. RDF can be serialized into many forms; we used the Lyo implementation of (primarily) RDF/XML in the POC.
Q3. Do changes exist in Teamcenter or RTC? Or is it just in the connector?
ML: The changes demonstrated existed in their respective systems. The "ECR-000001-Need ULEV for US and EU" change request exists in Teamcenter, and the "Defect 7: Vehicle fails to meet US ULEV Emissions requirements" exists in RTC. The connector holds no persistent data.
Q4. Are the requirement resources stored in Teamcenter or in another RM provider?
ML: In this demo the requirements shown were all stored in Teamcenter.
Q5. Is that linked data queried real-time or cached?
ML: The linked data was all queried live in real time from the respective system (always Teamcenter in this demo).
Q6. If a change is made to a requirement, how are change-orders that contain links to that requirement notified of the recently modified requirement?
ML: The demo (and OSLC in general) does not specify notification methods. There is some interest in this topic in the OSLC community but there is no standard developed so far [Ed: if you are interested in this topic, you may wish to post your needs and ideas in this forum section]. Teamcenter itself has many built in notification facilities that might be used for this purpose.
Q7. How large is your team, and how long have you been working on these concepts to build what we saw today?
ML: The team was three individuals: two GM embedded software engineers and me. The coding was mostly my responsibility in the project; the others provided real world user input, significant automated testing support and coding support for the Change Management and Architecture Management parts of the connector. In all we spent nearly six months on the project, but the total project included other significant deliverables. Estimated coding time is around 5 person-months.
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