Investigating contextual ontologies and document corpus characteristics for information access in engineering settings

Abstract

Knowledge and information resources play a pivotal role in enterprises and are valuable for solution reuse and learning through information access. However, identifying relevant information from a rapidly growing number of unstructured resources is challenging for users. We discuss a personalized information access tool for professional workplaces based on the recommender systems to provide relevant documents for users in specific work contexts based on domain-specific ontologies. Our use case is a multidisciplinary engineering project building an energy-efficient vehicle. We provide an indepth analysis of document corpus characteristics of this real-life shared engineering workspace to understand the content and context of documents using information retrieval methods and semantic annotations. Upon this, we build a contextual ontology as our knowledge domain for the recommender system. We validate our ontology-based content matching approach by evaluating the level of retrievability and coverage of the ontology against the indexed document corpus through experiments on the corpus and ontology. Our results provide insight into engineers' document workspaces and show that even a simple domain ontology is able to match a majority of documents from a domain-oriented corpus. The findings support our approach of using ontology-based recommendation for domain-specific workspaces.

Challenges for information access in multi-disciplinary product design and engineering settings

“…The paper has shown that the manufacturing engineering topic contains many worthy challenges from a search and recommendation perspective. We have examined the use of content-based personalisation [8], user profiles and background knowledge connected to a reference ontology [10], semantic content-based similarity and filesystem features, and developed an overall robust framework for an integrated Information Access system for the KBE domain.…”

“…4. Documents from multiple sources are ingested and semantically indexed with the help of a domain ontology [10]. The system then is able to provide tailored results to users.…”

“…The application domain involves specialised tasks, documents, and workflows, all in a professional search environment for domain experts who already have considerable tool support for large parts of the workflow. In our work, we particularly aim to explore the use of Information Access, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Process Ontologies, and Knowledge Management methods to a KBE project on engineering design [8], [7], [9], [10]. We will discuss challenges, and potential solutions in Section III after introducing the scenario in Section II.…”

A Systematic Procedure for Utilization of Product Usage Information in Product Development

“…To improve the provision of appropriate information, context-based approaches have been proposed. They help provide knowledge and relevant documents applicable to the engineer's situation [11,36]. Redon et al [11] presented a context-based search platform based on the identification of an engineering context and the subsequent pushing of applicable knowledge to that particular engineer.…”