A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Wikipedia: PLM Open Source Reference?

Wikipedia: PLM Open Source Reference?
Oleg
Oleg
4 August, 2010 | 2 min for reading

It becomes very common to use Wikipedia for most research projects. It becomes an ultimate source of information open for everybody. Do you think Wikipedia can become an open source reference for the information about software for engineering and manufacturing? Kind of Open Source PLM reference place?

What is a good source of knowledge about CAD, PDM, PLM and other systems? What can be used as a consolidated information reference? Think how much time we are spending in discussions about terminology, names, useful practices? What if Wikipedia will become this sort of knowledge? To understand current “state of the art”, I spent some time browsing PLM-related resources on Wikipedia. Here is my list of the references and my conclusion.

Terminology

I found quite complicated to work on well known TLAs. The search for PLM, brings the following definition:
Product lifecycle management, the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product. In addition, multiple searches for relevant terms are available. One of them stated as a PLM (marketing) is very far from product lifecycle management definitions and hardly can be a reference.
Some of other useful links – CADPDMPLMCAECAM. .

Companies

This part of Wikipedia is in a good shape, in my view. Most of the companies are represented. Sometimes, you can find interesting link redirection caused by company acquisitions, renaming and re-branding.

Autodesk
Aras (wasn’t intuitive to find- who may think searching for Corp.?)
Arena Solutions
Bentley Systems (was confused by multiple links to Bentley cars)
Dassault Systems (contains lots of links on deleted pages as a result of re-branding)
SolidWorks
PTC

Siemens PLM (recently renamed as Siemens Industry Software, according to upFront.eZine)

This is, of course, not a full list. I just started to come with some initial list and examples.

Standards

I found as a very complicated task to find PLM related standards. I found STEP (ISO 10303) pages in a relatively good shape. Also, list of “Engineering Standards” returned by Wikipedia search contains a list of interesting resources.

Other Resources

I found PLMPedia as a good resource of information about PLM. The PLMPedia initiative belongs to the Russian forum isicad.

What is my conclusion? I think the industry need to have a good reference source. Wikipedia is an excellent open source reference that can be adopted and used by lots of engineers and developers. These days I can see quality of industry is in supporting “open source reference”. Wikipedia is a good candidate for such information placement.

If you are aware about any additional information resources related to CAD, PLM and other engineering and manufacturing software, please send me links or comment on blog.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
21 January, 2017

Manufacturing world is changing and it can bring new opportunities for transformation and changes. Few days ago, I posted an...

30 October, 2015

Note – don’t try to Google for “configustamization”. There is no such word. I checked it already :). Few weeks...

24 September, 2014

Once upon a time “cloud” was a taboo word in PLM domain. It was hard to believe manufacturing companies will...

2 March, 2019

Earlier this week my attention was caught by Siemens PLM tweet message claiming the definition of low-cost PLM. Check this...

23 September, 2022

Manufacturing companies are under pressure to adopt new technologies in order to remain competitive. As the world of product development...

17 January, 2017

Shifts in a rapidly changing manufacturing world and dramatic changes internet is bringing to digital economy might become a challenge...

16 February, 2010

Social is hot. Social networks, social applications, social enterprise, social CRM… social PLM (?). I put a question mark, since...

6 June, 2013

Disclosure: As a co-founder of Inforbix and responsible of PLM 360 and Autodesk Vault product development at at Autodesk, I...

3 September, 2019

In the past few weeks, I found the topic of “PLM standards” came across multiple times. I brought the discussion...

Blogroll

To the top