?? Strategic Governance of PLM Standards: From Static Charts to Dynamic Semantic Radars ????

The ASD Strategy Standardization Group has been working for years on the governance of PLM standards for Aeronautic, Space and Defence in Europe. The key idea is that before implementing standards-based product data exchange, deploying customized applications, or enacting standards-based collaboration processes, a given community within a digital business ecosystem must first agree on a common, consistent set of relevant standards. This is a strategic activity, as it sets a shared long-term vision aligned with the time required to establish a working environment.

One of the main goals of such a governance group is to ensure alignment, preventing the emergence of silos and heterogeneous practices that could fragment the ecosystem. ASD SSG plays a crucial role in identifying and maintaining a set of agreed-upon standards—whether legacy standards, existing external standards, or new standards that need to be developed—while avoiding the proliferation of competing and inconsistent approaches.

To capture and visualize these decisions, ASD SSG relies on a radar chart. This chart provides a structured way to monitor standards, categorize them as adopted or under consideration, and track participation in external standardization efforts. The radar consists of concentric circles representing different levels of adoption—tracked, candidate, or adopted—crossed with quadrant divisions indicating:

• External standards available for use
• Monitored external developments
• Locally developed standards (e.g., ASD-specific ones)
• Active participation in external standardization efforts

While simple, this radar chart offers a high-level visualization of standards governance and serves as an entry point for exploring detailed descriptions and strategic insights.

From Static Charts to Dynamic, Interactive Governance Tools

Traditionally, such radars have been created using basic drawing tools or PowerPoint. However, maintaining them manually becomes inefficient as the number of monitored standards grows. To address this, we explore tools that generate radars dynamically from datasets and display them in interactive web pages.

Several freely available tools, such as Zalando Tech Radar and ThoughtWorks Radar Builder, offer web-based visualization of technology landscapes.

However, these solutions often function as standalone applications, requiring a web server to serve pages, which can limit their flexibility.

Integrating Radar Charts with ArchiCG for Semantic Standard Governance

Imagine integrating such radar charts with ArchiCG’s semantic cartography to extract radars for specific subsets and groups while leveraging existing semantic graphs.

The goal is to create a fully interactive, web-based standards governance tool that runs without requiring a dedicated server.

In this approach, radar blips would be represented as graph nodes, dynamically positioned on the radar. The rendering and interactive features would be implemented using graph visualization libraries. This would allow:

• Seamless navigation between different radar charts categorized by topics
• Detailed exploration of each standard, including its properties and structured textual descriptions
• Integration with ArchiCG’s broader semantic cartography framework
• Support for strategic standardization processes and easy publication of recommendations

This experiment aims to transition from static PowerPoint-based governance tools to dynamic, interactive HTML+SVG pages that integrate with graph technologies.

A first demonstrator shows how it can look like, applied to ASD SSG PLM radar chart, just relying on HTML+SVG.

Here the radar is created from an input data set with indication of the quadrant and its status. Positioning is automatically calculated and not persisted, with sometimes some potential issues with overlap of some nodes.

The next step is to integrate and to tie it with semantic cartography, replacing the blips implementation based on SVG circle by graph nodes representing elements of a semantic cartography.

A first prototype has been produced demonstrating the feasibility for such a replacement.

Here, the blips are graph nodes rendered by the rendering engine used with ArchiCG.

We can import some data set without any placement on the radar, the prototype position it automatically.

You can decide to move manually the nodes if the way it was automatically placed doesn't fit you expectations, in particular if some overlapping nodes or if the resulting relative placements of some standards is not what you expect.

You can save the results and reuse you decision for future displaying taking into consideration you changes

This is just the beginning of the exploration of technical features which can be imagine from such an integration.

E.g. we can imagine to use the radar for assigning a blip to a zone and quarter, then setting or modifying status and categorization of the blip. It requires to capture the position of the node in order to identify the zone (related to radius) and quarter (related to angle).

So it means we can have interactive radar used not only for displaying information but for defining it. Let's note that such approach can be generalized with various kind of visual templates, being a radar or various other canvas, such as Business Model canvas, SWOT canvas... which can be used to support strategic analysis of PLM standards.

The next step is to elaborate on the added value it could bring for gouvernance of standards and to provide innovative semantic cartography based approaches for leveraging the association of standard governance with semantic cartographies.

If successful, it could lead to new ArchiCG modules and features tailored for standards governance.

We welcome your thoughts and contributions—let’s collaborate to refine and enhance this vision!