Product Life-Cycle Metadata Modeling and Its Application with RDF

The whole product life cycle consists of three phases: beginning of life (BOL), middle of life (MOL), and end of life (EOL). Although large amounts of product life-cycle data are generated over the whole product life cycle, data flows are rather vague after BOL. Over the last decade, however, emerging Internet, wireless mobile telecommunications, and product identification technologies have created the potential of making the whole product life cycle visible. As a result, the scope of data to be managed has expanded over the whole product life cycle. Hence, it becomes important to describe product life-cycle metadata in a systematic manner. Although much attention has been paid to data modeling over several objects such as products and processes, modeling methodology for product life-cycle metadata is not well developed. To cope with this limitation, we develop a modeling method for product life-cycle metadata by using the resource description framework (RDF). We define an RDF data model and its schema for describing and managing product life-cycle metadata. In addition, we describe how the proposed RDF model can be usefully applied to track, trace, and infer product life-cycle data with an RDF query language.