New Technologies and Standards for Design Knowledge Management in Collaborative Conceptual Design

Current working methods and techniques in collaborative, distributed and knowledge intensive engineering design environment have a number of problems. Applications and techniques for managing the knowledge within the lifecycle are either too inflexible, and so remain unused, or completely uncoordinated resulting in the use of incoherent documents and filling systems to store information in an ad-hoc manner. This ongoing project, working with industrial partners, aims to provide a middle-ground application and methodology to enable users to define their ontologies from building blocks of RDF schema based components. This project also includes the use of STEP AP- 224 models within the knowledge base to define the feature and geometry of the designed component and aims to integrate the process element using XPDL into the knowledge base in the future.