- Software engineering has the advantage of only existing as digital information and usually in an accessible form once security concerns are allayed. This makes configuration management of these "digital only" objects somewhat easier than for engineered systems that are primarily thought of as physical objects which may or may not be accompanied by a "piece of paper" - or if you haven't been living in a cave for the last twenty years - a data file.
For complex engineered objects this data file could be the equivalent of thousands of printed pages - or it could be a simple as a tag on a bin full of identical [1] objects.
The electronic "data file" (or set of files) for a physical object should be considered to be the analogue equivalent of the physical object itself and brings the physical world to be packaged into the digital world just as if it only existed in its digital equivalent. Loosing the "data file" for a physical object may make the physical object itself into a worthless piece of junk - especially in industries such as aeronautics and nuclear power.
For HRI the solution is to create a common data container for all physical and digital objects and to treat all of them digitally. Systems and parts start life as an idea and eventually become a physical reality by the processes of engineering and manufacturing and may eventually be junked - but they never loose their data - as long as there's a reason to keep it. This digital analogue for physical objects is the "Data Sheet" and is defined by CDID km48.
The data sheet itself is a collection of data elements defined by "Key Codes" which indicate the meaning, units, accuracy, status, source and a number of other elements for all of the "important" [2] characteristics of the physical object. The Key Codes themselves are part of a controlled vocabulary - in project hri07e terms - a Data Dictionary - which is a list of jargon and terminology controlled by the HRI Special Interest Group (SIG) for whatever technical, scientific, business or artistic (even) specialty considers itself to be the group of experts for that item. Thus a single data sheet (especially in construction) may have data elements which are defined by Architects (SIG:ARCH) , Civil Engineers (SIG:CE), Electrical Engineers (SIG:EE), Project Managers (SIG:PM), Accountants (SIG:ACC) and even legal terms (SIG:LEG) - and which may occasionally use the same symbol - but with completely different meanings. (Do you know how many times the letter V gets used in data sheets - for voltage, velocity, variance, vacuum, surface finish, volume and who knows what else?).
In this case the "data sheet" becomes the analogue for the physical object and the analogue for the complete system becomes the "ISEL" - which should have a data sheet for each branch in the tree itself. (For example - a "Cooling Water System" has data that is separate and distinct from a "Cooling Water Pump".) The ISEL is engineering's equivalent to software's release control process.
compare: sig:sys visualization