As methods for engineering data acquisition improve, methods for storing, generating knowledge from, and sharing that data for efficient reuse have become more important. Knowledge management in the engineering community can greatly benefit from advancements made in knowledge management in biology. The biological community has already made progress in knowledge management through projects such as the Gene Ontology and CellML, and it behooves the engineering community to learn from their successes. Engineering and biology overlap in the field of biosimulation, (i.e. finite-element analysis of biological systems, see www.biomesh.org) which gives an opportunity to integrate successful ontologies from the biology community into the engineering community. Previous research has led to the creation of the Biomesh project, which is a collection of biological finite element (FE) models. These FE models relate to a particular anatomical structure of an organism, and to the set of biological material properties associated with the models. Thus, knowledge management for this application requires knowledge integration from three distinct fields: engineering (materials and models), anatomy, and biological classification. The existing e-Design Framework offers the Engineering Analysis Models ontology and Materials ontology to store knowledge about materials and FE models. Similarly, the existing Minimal Anatomical Terms ontology and the NCBI Organismal Classification taxonomy were used to store information about anatomy and biological classification, respectively. In this paper these ontologies are interlinked in a single, synergistic ontology to expose and integrate knowledge in a transparent manner between previously disparate domains. A case study is presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach in which knowledge from a biological material and FE model are methodically stored in the new ontology, and the organismal classification and anatomical structure of the model are immediately exposed to the user.

Data exchange between different computer-aided design (CAD) systems is a major problem inhibiting information integration in collaborative engineering environments. Existing CAD data format standards such as STEP and IGES enable geometric data exchange. However, they ignore construction history, features, constraints, and other parametric-based CAD data. As a result, they are inadequate for supporting modification, extension and other important higher-level functionality when accessing an imported CAD model from another CAD system. Achieving such higher-level functionality therefore often requires a time-consuming, error-prone, tedious process of manually recreating the model in the target CAD system. Based on techniques adapted from programming language research, this paper presents an approach to exchanging parametric data between CAD systems using formally-defined conversion semantics. We have demonstrated the utility of our approach by developing a prototype implementation that automates the conversion of 2D sketches between two popular CAD systems: Pro/ENGINEER and SolidWorks. We present examples showing that our approach is able to accurately convert parametric CAD data even in cases where models were constructed using operations from the source CAD system that have no direct counterpart in the target CAD system. Although the case study focuses on 2D interoperability, our approach provides formal foundations for supporting 3D and semantic interoperability between CAD systems.