Siemens is the largest engineering company in Europe. It focuses on industrial automation, building automation, transportation, and health technology.
Information buried across engineering systems
The Siemens XSearch project was initiated to establish a semantic foundation for enterprise search across Siemens’ engineering and manufacturing environment. The core objective was to make information buried across engineering applications, CAD data, documents, and other enterprise systems more discoverable and connected.
Think big, start small: 50 core concepts
The initial engagement focused on developing an ontology extending the Semantic Arts “gist” foundation. The first version was intentionally scoped to approximately 50 core concepts, with the expectation that the ontology would provide value beyond search as a reusable enterprise semantic foundation.
The project demonstrated that a disciplined semantic modeling approach – we call it “think big, start small” – could provide early value through the search use case, yet be broadly reusable in ever-more foundational aspects of the firm. Key areas modeled included:
- Equipment, components and systems
- Functions, specifications and requirements
- Engineering models – functional, logical and physical
- Bills of materials
This provided a strong foundation for connecting information broadly across the firm, rather than optimizing the ontology solely for one application.
From proof of concept to a foundation for digital twins
By the end of the project period, the effort had evolved beyond the original XSearch proof of concept into a broader semantic architecture for Siemens engineering and manufacturing, and a foundation for their digital twin work. The resulting standards-based ontology provided a common, future-proof semantic foundation for use across multiple applications, data stores, and industry domains.
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