In the highly competitive engineering industry, product innovations are created with the help of a product lifecycle management (PLM) tool chain. In order to support fast-paced product development, a major company goal is the reuse of product designs and product descriptions. Due to the product’s complexity, the design of a product not only consists of geometry data but also of valuable engineering knowledge that is created during the various PLM phases. The need to preserve such intellectual capital leads engineering companies to introduce knowledge management and archiving their machine-readable formal representation. However, archived knowledge is in danger of becoming unusable since it is very likely that knowledge semantics and knowledge representation will evolve over long time periods, for example during the 50 operational years of some products. Knowledge evolution and knowledge representation technology changes are crucial issues since a reuse of the archived product information can only be ensured if its rationale and additional knowledge are interpretable with future software and technologies. Therefore, in order to reuse design data fully, knowledge about the design must also be migrated to be interoperable with future design systems and knowledge representation methods. This paper identifies problems, issues, requirements, challenges and solutions that arise while tackling the long-term preservation of engineering knowledge.

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Important legal and economic motivations exist for the design and engineering industry to address and integrate digital long-term preservation into product life cycle management (PLM). Investigations revealed that it is not sufficient to archive only the product design data which is created in early PLM phases, but preservation is needed for data that is produced during the entire product lifecycle including early and late phases. Data that is relevant for preservation consists of requirements analysis documents, design rationale, data that reflects experiences during product operation and also metadata like social collaboration context. In addition, also the engineering environment itself that contains specific versions of all tools and services is a candidate for preservation. This paper takes a closer look at engineering preservation use case scenarios as well as PLM characteristics and workflows that are relevant for long-term preservation. Resulting requirements for a long-term preservation system lead to an OAIS (Open Archival Information System) based system architecture and a proposed preservation service interface that respects the needs of the engineering industry.

Providing access to digital information for the indefinite future is the intention of long-term digital preservation systems. One application domain that certainly needs to implement such long-term digital preservation processes is the design and engineering industry. In this industry, products are designed, manufactured, and operated with the help of sophisticated software tools provided by product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. During all PLM phases, including geographically distributed cross-domain and cross-company collaboration, a huge amount of heterogeneous digital product data and metadata is created. Legal and economic requirements demand that this product data has to be archived and preserved for a long-time period. Unfortunately, the software that is able to interpret the data will become obsolete earlier than the data since the software and hardware lifecycle is relatively short-lived compared to a product lifecycle. Companies in the engineering industry begin to realize that their data is in danger of becoming unusable while the products are in operation for several decades. To address this issue, different academic and industrial initiatives have been initiated that try to solve this problem. This article provides an overview of these projects including their motivations, identified problems, and proposed solutions. The studied projects are also verified against a classification of important aspects regarding scope and functionality of digital preservation in

A b s t r a c t For various reasons conventional database systems f a i l t o provide appropriate support f o r a wide v a r i e t y of applications. Therefore, new generation database systems are being developed i n some recent research efforts, among them OOPS. OOPS is an object-oriented programming environ-ment with integrated d a t a management facilities. I t is designed t o especially support advanced applications, l i k e e. g. engineering and o f f i c e applications.Rich d a t a modelling f a c i l i t i e s , including t h e concepts of classif ication, generalization and aggregation, are provided. Additionally, complex semantic i n t e g r i t y constraints, exception-handling mechanisms and t r i g g e r s can be specified. Since all these facilities are integrated i n t o a single language, t h e a r t i f i c i a l d i s t i n c t i o n between database language and programming language is no longer existent. In t h i s paper w e w i l l essentially present t h e main f e a t u r e s of t h e programming language and t h e a r c h i t e c t u r e of OOPS. Due t o space limitations a discussion of t h e database component is skipped.