Keywords: collaboration, grid technology, semantic web, ontology, grid service, web service, virtual organisation, civil engineering, InteliGrid.

A challenge for collaboration infrastructures is to support dynamic virtual organisations (VO) [1] that collaborate on the design, production and maintenance of products that are described in complex structured product model databases. Such VOs are typical for industries with long supply chains like the automotive, shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Perhaps the most complex dynamically changing VOs and are in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC).

The integration of the AEC industry and the interoperability of the hundreds of software applications and other resources that exist in VOs have been providing one of the most challenging environments for the application of information and communication technologies. The "islands of automation" problem [2], shown in Figure 69.1, has been identified by the AEC community in the late 1980s and several national and EU projects have addressed the problem since.

We believe that grid technology or simply the grid, that is defined as a system that coordinates distributed resources using standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces to deliver a nontrivial quality of service [3], that can provide a robust collaboration environment. But to achieve complete resource integration the grid itself needs to commit to the VO's product and process ontology thereby evolving into an ontology committed semantic grid. To the end user as well as the engineering software developer this will bring two major improvements. The grid infrastructure eliminates the need of knowing exact locations of information and services. They are "on the grid" not at some Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) or Internet Protocol (IP) address. The shared semantics powered by ontology reduces the need to know the exact structure and access paths of the data in product model databases. The result is a semantic or cognitive grid.

InteliGrid (Interoperability of Virtual Organisations on Complex Semantic Grid) [4] an European 6th Framework Information Society project (2004-2007) aims to provide complex industries such as construction, automotive and aerospace stable, co-allocated, reliable, unified, adaptive, remote, ambient accessible, interoperable, pay-per-demand access to: (1) information, (2) communication and (3) processing infrastructure and thereby provide the integration and interoperability infrastructure. This paper presents its baseline, hypothesis and expected results as well as the first developments towards the above described platform. The project's impact is expected to be wide; it will create knowledge, infrastructure and toolkits that will allow for a broad transition of the industry towards semantic, model based, ontology committed collaboration using the grid, rather than the Web, as the infrastructure, thus enabling the grid to become a mainstream collaboration paradigm.

1

I. Foster, C. Kesselman & S. Tuecke "The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organisations", International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 15 (3). p. 200-222. 2001. doi:10.1177/109434200101500302

2

M. Hannus & P. Silén, "Islands of Automation", http://cic.vtt.fi/hannus/islands, 1987, (updated by M. Hannus, 2002)

3

I. Foster & C. Kesselman, "Concepts and Architecture", The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, ed. I. Foster & C. Kesselman, p. 37-63, Elsevier Inc., 2004. doi:10.1016/B978-155860933-4/50007-9

4

Interoperability of Virtual Organisations on Complex Semantic Grid (InteliGrid), http://www.InteliGrid.com

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