Some of the research to date in creating an interlingua between Computer Aided E

ngineering programs.
The International Standardisation Organisation's efforts at harmonisation across
different engineering disciplines, programs resulted in huge and poorly seperat
ed protocols.
Only the most practical of specifications, ISO 10303 AP203 giving the boundary r
epresentation of geometric objects was ever adopted.
Meanwhile, engineering software and analysis programs adopted higher level repre
sentation of objects, features.
Models are composed of a specification of features and transforms in sequence th
at can be altered in parametric fashion, causing a cascade of changes in subsequ
ent history.
Parametric feature exchange was implemented independently by commercial CAx prov
iders, resulting in huge expense transferring feature semantics between differen
t software packages.
As CAD packages have extensive API's, the effort of providing translations betwe
en programs is significant and encounters a degree of semantic incompatibility.
The
Many prescriptive standards and neutral file formats have been proposed/presente
d.
Ontologies have been more recently adopted as a means of organising representati
on of features and commands between programs.
Different requirements and aspects of the same data can be represented in a mach
ine-searchable structure, the formalisation of information within an ontology al
lows machine reasoning and machine checking.
Coupled with an extensible, self-describing language like XML, it has been perci
eved as the most fruitful method of creating an intermediate representation of t
he semantic content of features.
An ongoing issue is the merging of seperate ontologies. Where a framework has be
en defined in advance of applications (e.g. GIS), then commercial applications t
end to be compliant.
Post-hoc specification, as is the case with the ISO parametric CAD specification
s, are not consistently implemented.
Every program with an API can be considered to have a form of local ontology. I
identify two basic approaches to merging, or bridging ontologies.
The first is to specify a meta-ontology, top ontology or bridging ontology; a su
perset of characteristics, or a collection of axioms and rules allowing translat
ion between seperate sub-ontologies.
The second is to create a bottom-up ontology, identifying common elements along
with unique elements.
The holy grail of ontology creation is the automation of what is otherwise a lab
orious task.