The Design of an Engineering Data Warehouse Based on Meta-Object Structures

Large scale engineering and scientific projects demand product and workflow management which may require integration and/or distribution over many separate organisations. The integration of such ‘islands of information’, which ultimately forms the basis of so-called ‘virtual enterprises’, is heavily dependent on the flexibility and accessibility of the data model describing the enterprise’s repository. The model must provide interoperability and reusability so that a range of applications can access the enterprise data. Making the repository self-describing ensures that knowledge about the repository structure is available for applications to interrogate and to navigate around for the extraction of application-specific data. Herein a large application is described which uses a meta-object based repository to capture product and workflow data in an engineering data warehouse. It is shown that adopting a meta-object approach to repository design provides support for interoperability and a suitable environment on which to build data mining applications.