Meeting on 2012-12-17
Attending: Rainer, David, Mike, Steve
We reviewed the HSUV example expressed as product trees in Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager at HSUV_example_in_Rational_Lifecycle_Manager_1.
We discussed whether the idea of a part resource was useful. In Mike’s earlier examples, the data about links
was expressed using reification. For example, this might include a PLM variant expression.
In Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager an explicit part resource
is used to allow operations such as pin/unpin, use snapshot, replace branch. Having a part as an explicit
resource means you can refer to properties of that resource and that might make it easier to change those
properties directly. Another potential use of a part resource is to represent empty parts. This seemed
like a useful concept since PLM tools often had a bill of materials, and for some referenced concept
resources, no version might be chosen. Representing this as reification of a link presents some issues
since this only works if there is a link. One might reference rdf:nil explicitly so it can be reified.
However, if there are several such links to different concept resources using the same predicate, uniquely
reifying each one becomes awkward. So there seemed some benefits to using an explicit part resource.
We briefly discussed whether the OSLC PLM specification should state that a part references:
- Only another view resource. This align’s to Mike’s examples.
- Only another item or item version resource. This matches the representation in Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager.
- Either #1 or #2. This would make it possible for both PLM tools and Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager to be conformant to the specification.
This is a topic that we hope to continue to explore in the early meetings in 2013.
