Abstract

Design-centric R&D workflows in civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and aerospace generate digital artifacts that couple geometry with constraints, solver settings, experimental traces, and provenance. Reusing these artifacts across design, simulation, and lifecycle systems requires preserving both syntactic fidelity (geometry and files) and semantic fidelity (function, intent, assumptions and lineage). This mini-review proposes a lightweight, team-owned semantic-provenance framework that combines a minimal canonical export and controlled property dictionary, a standards-aligned provenance manifest, a mediation and validation hub for cross-tool semantic enrichment and canonical part identity, standardized transport of runtime data, and automated round-trip validation to detect semantic drift. The approach aims to improve model reuse, traceability, and cross-disciplinary collaboration while remaining practical to deploy within existing engineering toolchains.