The article was originally published on 02/02/2020 and was updated on 12/20/2024
The digital world brings both opportunity and complexity, especially for engineering enterprises striving to integrate diverse tools and systems. Effective integration is essential to maintain relationships between unique assets and enable seamless collaboration across teams. But how can organizations achieve this without creating silos or duplicating data?
Enter the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard—a groundbreaking approach to integration that links artifacts and repositories without the need for replication. OSLC builds on the web's proven principles of linking rather than copying, offering a robust and scalable framework for engineering enterprises.
In this article, we are going to explore the concept of OSLC. What is OSLC? How does OSLC bridge the gap between tools, secure relationships across repositories, and empower organizations to harness the power of the digital thread? Whether you’re an engineer, IT manager, or tool vendor, discover how OSLC can transform your integration strategy and streamline collaboration across your enterprise.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Unveiling the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (or OLSC standard)
2. How Does OSLC Work?
3. OSLC's Major Asset: Connecting Existing Applications Artifacts
4. OSLC or the Links Beneath The Surface, Collaboration!
5. Implement The Digital Thread with OSLC
Unveiling the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (or OLSC standard)
The Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OLSC standard) provides a set of specifications designed to simplify integration across multiple tools used throughout the software development lifecycle. It is the unifying solution for tool vendors and users that addresses the need to connect engineering data and achieve the digital thread across software and systems engineering tools, domains, and organizations.
What does OSLC Standard have to offer?
OSLC’s core function is the mandate to create relationships between related elements without the replication of data. It was a lesson learned on the web that a link is much more potent than a copy. Fortunately, this objective of eliminating replication is also pragmatic for IT enterprises to address the scale, permissions, and usability of tools.
Much like we don’t copy websites, we don’t copy artifacts when leveraging OSLC. As one explores OSLC, it is valuable to know that it is built on existing technologies. Web protocols, RESTful APIs, and usage of XML and RDF provide a known foundation for building a Linked Data Platform.
For tool vendors, existing libraries and experience can be leveraged to create these OSLC solutions. The details of OSLC may be complex, but the ideas and experiences are not.
How Does OSLC Work?
OSLC technology creates connections between servers in the enterprise. It provides the foundation to achieve interoperability by using the concept of Friending to create a trusted relationship, leveraging Oauth, between any repositories that need connections.
To enable the plug-and-play of repositories, OSLC provides discovery services for tool interaction. These service providers express the end-points tools can leverage to identify, query, and create artifacts in that repository.
In this way, OSLC provides both structure and flexibility on how an enterprise can be leveraged.
OSLC secures relationships across repositories
At a more accurate level, OSLC provides project relationships that define how a specific project in a repository is related to projects in another repository. With this project-oriented structure, engineering teams can assemble relationships across the repositories dedicated to their particular needs.
The value is a secured relationship between several repositories that teams can leverage to enable engineers to collaborate across the enterprise with their tools of choice.
Both the IT teams and the Engineering teams win with this pattern.
OSLC leaves data in its native repository
Much of the benefit of OSLC for engineering enterprises is the ability to leave data in its native repository. OSLC enables the enterprise to access any artifact, but permission and access control for the user remain in the end repository.
The removal of replication and synchronization of data by OSLC simplifies security concerns and reduces poor access controls. In the OSLC enterprise, permissions are managed where the data is created and maintained.
OSLC's Major Asset: Connecting Existing Applications Artifacts
While it is valuable to have relationships between projects, it is most helpful to understand the role in which these relationships play.
OSLC acknowledges this need for roles with the definition of Domains. These Domains define a collection of vocabularies which are artifact types, relationship types, and attribute types. For example, the Requirements Management domain defines what a requirement is, how to group requirements together into collections, and how to relate/link requirements to themselves and other Domains.
These common artifact shapes make it easier to define common standard relationships between tools for users. The pattern of simple interfaces and unique implementations continues in the user interface. OSLC demands tools to provide each application with rich previews, creation dialogs, and a selector to find (and link) existing artifacts. Each of these widgets enables the embedded access of one tool within another and realizing the seamless experience of OSLC while navigating the enterprise.
OSLC or the Links Beneath The Surface, Collaboration!
The purpose of OSLC is to collaborate between tools. Collaboration mandates that an application can consistently locate an artifact, the same artifact, using a standard address.
Building on its web foundation, OSLC commonizes on URLs that enable the direct location of these resources. Consistent with the web heritage, applications use these locators to access, update, and delete artifacts using standard web protocols.
The linking, the artifact collaboration, can now be expressed simply as a relationship descriptor, and a target URI to create a link (and potentially a mirrored backlink using the source URI) between artifacts.
Implement The Digital Thread with OSLC
With this framework, OSLC enables the development of richly linked enterprises enabling the Digital Thread.
The building blocks of OSLC are the constructs of the web. Above is the starting point of OSLC. Growth into domains with configuration management as well as capabilities such as reporting (built on indexers) is what leverages this investment.
At SodiusWillert, we use skill and creativity to build applications within this standard to deliver powerful integrations to users. The way they are leveraged can create a rich linked data platform realizing the digital thread through data and across applications.
How we help integrate the software development lifecycle with OSLC
Following the specifications defined by OSLC, SodiusWillert provides OSLC-compliant connectors that enable the integration of disconnected development applications in engineering organizations. We take connecting your data and achieving the digital thread across domains, applications, and organizations very seriously and we know how much this is no easy ride. Our OSLC Connect product range answers the needs of engineering organizations to make engineering data available to systems and software development teams to accelerate development projects.
️️➡️ Explore OSLC Connect for Jira
️️➡️ Explore OSLC Connect for Confluence
➡️ Explore OSLC Connect for PTC Windchill
Leave us your comment