I’ve been a bit frustrated in recent weeks by electronic circuit design tools. The typical process is to draw out the circuit schematic, run simulations and then generate/draw PCB layouts etc. Many of the tools (especially on *nix) use SPICE format to represent the circuit topology between the different operations.
The tools I’ve looked at so far all appear to have one major flaw or another.
To give just three examples:
- gEDA – rather out-of-date, clunky UI
- KiCad – the netlists it generates aren’t quite compatible with SPICE (circuit emulation) tools
- Fritzing – the netlists it generate are nothing like SPICE format (I believe it uses XML)
So, the go-to representation as far as I’m concerned for pretty much anything is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). So I had a quick search around looking to see if anyone had looked at SPICE in RDF before. D’oh! I found a SPICE vocab I’d roughed out on GitHub around 2011. Jeez, my memory.
So it turns out that most of what I might have put in this post, I’ve already written up in Adding SPICE to the Semantic Web.
Just a couple of things to add here.
Why not use JSON?
Since I did that post, JSON has become fairly ubiquitous, I’m sure it’s now most coders’ go-to representation of data. But in its basic form it isn’t Web-friendly, in the sense that it doesn’t natively support links.
Links could make things much easier to share and find: circuits, components, datasheets etc (the description of the circuit in RDF would include URLs for the components, which in turn could be associate with their characteristics, with their datasheets, etc etc).
There’s even a commercial angle. Given the list of components, a bill of materials can be generated. But typically nowadays you have to trawl through vendors to find suitable suppliers. But in RDF, the component could be associated with a vendor, with fields like the price etc. A distributed SPARQL query could figure much of this stuff out automatically.
Ok, why not use JSON? – There’s JSON-LD, which is an RDF representation, it’s JSON with links included.
One other idea. In the middle of typing this, I had a brief chat with Reto, told him what I was typing. He wondered whether there might be a role for inference (which is a good question, given the existence of RDF/OWL reasoners). Hmmm, my immediate response was, yeah, maybe something like consistency-checking a circuit for dangling wires. But Reto made the point that OWL probably wouldn’t be the best reasoning for the job, this might be more of a SHACL use case.
ELFquake 