An Experimental Evaluation of Design Information Reuse During Conceptual Design

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia

et al. 2007

The design and maintenance of an aero-engine generates a significant amount of documentation. When designing new engines, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from maintenance of existing engines to identify possible areas of concern. We developed a Semantic Web based document repository for transferring front-line maintenance knowledge to design. The Semantic Web is an ideal candidate for this application because of the size and distributed nature of an aerospace manufacturer's operation. The Semantic Web allows us to dynamically cross reference documents with the use of an ontology. However, during the design and implementation of this project, we found deficiencies in the W3C 1 recommended Semantic Web query language SPARQL. It is difficult to answer questions our users sought from the document repository using SPARQL. The problem is that SPARQL is designed for handling textual queries. In industrial applications, many common textual and semantic questions also contain a numerical element, be it data summarization or arithmetic operations. In this paper, we generalize the problems we found with SPARQL, and extend it to cover web applications in non-aerospace domains. Based on this analysis, we recommend that SQL-styled grouping, aggregation and variable operations be added to SPARQL, as they are necessary for industrial applications of the Semantic Web. At the moment, to answer the non-textual questions we identified with an RDF store, custom written software is needed to process the results returned by SPARQL. We incorporated the suggested numerical functionalities from SQL for an example query, and achieved a 21.7% improvement to the speed of execution. More importantly, we eliminate the need of extra processing in software, and thus make it easier and quicker to develop Semantic Web applications.

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lesson learnt from a large-scale industrial semantic web application

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia

et al. 2007

“…It has been estimated that 90% of industrial design activity is based on variant design [9], while during a redesign activity up to 70% of the information is taken from previous solutions [15]. A cursory consideration of these figures identified two immediate challenges -how to capture knowledge, and how to retrieve it.…”

Section: Scenariomentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge engineering from frontline support to preliminary design

Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

et al. 2006

The design and maintenance of complex engineering systems such as a jet engine generates a significant amount of documentation. Increasingly, aerospace manufacturers are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new engines, engineers must increasingly consider the life-cycle requirements in addition to design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from the entire life of an engine. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a company's operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents accrued makes it impossible to examine thoroughly. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for such an application. It searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to aid engineers in creating design requirement documents that incorporate aftermarket issues. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge-based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our proposed architecture, we have developed and deployed a working prototype. The prototype has been demonstrated to engineers and received positive reviews.

“…It has been estimated that 90% of industrial design activity is based on variant design [1], while during a redesign activity up to 70% of the information is taken from previous solutions [3]. A cursory consideration of these figures identified two immediate challenges -how to capture knowledge, and how to retrieve it.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

On a service-oriented approach for an engineering knowledge desktop

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on World Wide Web

2006

Increasingly, manufacturing companies are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new products, engineers must increasingly consider the life cycle costs in addition to any design requirements. To identify possible areas of concern, designers are required to consult existing maintenance information from identical products. However, in a large engineering company, the amount of information available is significant and in wide range of formats. This paper presents a prototype knowledge desktop suitable for the design engineer. The Engineering Knowledge Desktop analyses and suggests relevant information from ontologically marked-up heterogeneous web resources. It is designed using a Service-Oriented Architecture, with an ontology to mediate between Web Services. It has been delivered to the user community for evaluation.