SMART Standards: Modularization Approach for Engineering Standards

Abstract

Standards are a valuable source of knowledge in product development and support engineering activities throughout the entire product development process. However, against the industry-wide trend of digitization, the provision and usage of standards has not changed significantly over the last decade. To satisfy customer requirements, standards development organizations are increasingly interested in publishing their content outside of traditional formats such as print or PDF. One example is the content-based modularization rather than the provision of whole documents (Content-as-a-Service). This paper examines existing modularization approaches as well as their transferability towards the domain of standardization. Based on these approaches, a concept for the modularization of formulas and especially the development of a formula module is designed and elaborated. Therefore, descriptive elements of formulas are identified and structured. The module then serves as template for the future documentation of formulas in XML standards. Afterwards, the identified modules are integrated into an existing SMART standards expert system in order to demonstrate possible applications of content-based standard provision. Future work will investigate methods for the automatic extraction of the identified descriptive formula elements as well as their semantic modelling in knowledge graphs. Moreover, the described concept serves as starting point for future research in modularization of engineering standards.