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Today, the worlds and terminologies of mechanical engineering and software engineering coexist, but they do not always work together seamlessly. Both worlds have developed their own separate formal vocabulary for expressing their concepts as well as for capturing and communicating their respective domain knowledge. But, these two vocabularies are not unified, interwoven, or at least interconnected in a reasonable manner. Thus, the subject of this paper is a comparison of the vocabularies of the two fields, namely feature technology from the area of mechanical engineering and software design patterns from the software engineering domain. Therefore, a certain amount of definitions, history, examples, etc. is presented for features as well as for design patterns. After this, an analysis is carried out to identify analogies and differences. The main intention of this paper is to inform both worlds - mechanical and software engineering - about the other side's terminology and to start a discussion about potential mutual benefits and possibilities to bridge the gap between these two worlds, e.g. to improve the manageability of CAx product development processes.
Several activities around the world aim at integrating object-oriented data models with relational ones in order to improve database management systems. As a first result of these activities, object-relational database management systems (ORDBMS) are already commercially available and, simultaneously, are subject to several research projects. This (position) paper reports on our activities in exploiting object-relational database technology for establishing repository manager functionality supporting software engineering (SE) processes. We argue that some of the key features of ORDBMS can directly be exploited to fulfill many of the needs of SE processes. Thus, ORDBMS, as we think, are much better suited to support SE applications than any others. Nevertheless, additional functionality, e. g., providing adequate version management, is required in order to gain a completely satisfying SE repository. In order to remain flexible, we have developed a generative approach for providing this additional functionality. It remains to be seen whether this approach, in turn, can effectively exploit ORDBMS features. This paper, therefore, wants to show that ORDBMS can substantially contribute to both establishing and running SE repositories.