Advanced Knowledge System for Coatings and the Gas Turbine MRO Industry

Abstract The growth of data generated within thermal spraying is, for many, a daunting business. Yet, this growing resource represents a largely untapped and potentially valuable asset capable of providing “knowledge” rather than just “information”. Many companies already use a range of Web based tools. However, the Web itself is changing and the vision for the future, the “Semantic Web”, is set to revolutionise how business will be done. One important aspect of this Web “future” is that web pages will be greatly enriched and data will have additional information (tags) which help to describe it and more significantly, put the data into a context. This will enable machine readability and the use of query languages to ask direct questions. Following on from ideas introduced at ITSC 2007, a proof of concept demonstrator has been built for thermal spray coatings used in the Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) of gas turbines. A system has been built which stores and manipulates a range of data including; aircraft deliveries, RSS feeds of aircraft sales, engine types, MRO business details, thermal spray coatings and market dynamics. This paper presents the development of this system and discusses its future potential.