Data Clouds for product life-cycle management

This paper addresses removing barriers for sharing information in order to optimize the life-cycle of products within the civil engineering sector. Organisations working together on projects, applying Product Life-cycle Management, face a number of challenges. Their information originates from different sources and different pieces of software, encumbering sharing and integration of the information. What is needed is a data solution that allows integration of information available in separately managed sets: Data Clouds. We suggest that Semantic Web technology is particularly suitable to realise Data Clouds. This technology meets the required conditions for both managing civil engineering data (flexible, scalable, yet remaining coherent and consistent) and sharing such data (vendor-neutral, enabler for integration). Successful implementations in the field show that the suggested data solution is not just a good choice theoretically, but has also been proven to already be effective in practice.