Converting Diagram to a Timeline Ontology

Abstract

CAD systems design and development is not a simple process. It consists of large amount of works, most of them are interconnected and should be performed either simultaneously or sequentially, some of them depend on success of previous works etc. Design workflows allow to describe works in visual form and calculate their quantitative and qualitative parameters. They significantly increase the design process efficiency and the product quality due to the usage of participants interaction language unification. However, modern workflow management tools lack of some important functions especially in part of temporal analysis and ontology-based timeline diagrams. In this paper, we describe the novel method to convert any diagram to a timeline structure like an ontology. The method includes converting algorithm and allows engineers to get the issue of workflows in which they are involved thus giving them a help to design complex CAD systems. It is shown that any diagram describing complex system behavior may be converted into simple view as a timeline ontology. An illustrated example is given in the article.