Collaborative engineering based on knowledge sharing agreements

The design of products by multi-disciplinary groups is a knowledge intensive activity. Collaborators must be able to exchange information and share some common understanding of the information's content. The hope. however, that an integrated workbench of application tools will span the needs of engineering collaborators is misplaced. We argue that an integrated workbench of application tools cannot meet the long-term needs of engineering collaborators. Moreover, standards cannot satisfy the information sharing needs of collaborators, because these needs are dynamic. This paper discusses the design and use of a shared representation of knowledge (language and vocabulary) to facilitate communication among specialists and their tools. The paper advances the opinion that collaborators need the ability to establish and customize knowledge sharing agreements (i.e., mutually agreed upon terminology and definitions) that are usable by people and their machines. The paper describes a formal approach to representing engineering knowledge, describes its role in a computational framework that integrates a heterogeneous mix of software tools, and discusses its relationship to current and emerging data exchange standards. This work is supported by ARPA contract DAAA 15-91-CO104 as part of the SHADE project. (CDR TR#19940912).