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Knowledge-rich catalog services for engineering design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2003

JIHIE KIM ,
PETER WILL ,
S. RINGO LING  and
BOB NECHES
JIHIE KIM
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California, USA
PETER WILL
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California, USA
S. RINGO LING
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California, USA
BOB NECHES
Affiliation:
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California, USA
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Abstract

The exponential growth of the Internet and increasing communication and computational power have created many opportunities for advancing engineering, manufacturing, and business activities. Among them are electronic catalogs. These have become basic information resources to a number of people, ranging from shoppers looking for personal items to engineers selecting electromechanical parts to build a product. Although rich in content, current catalog systems are limited both in search quality and in realizing the full potential of the retrieved information. The active catalog system brings a conceptually new idea to electronic commerce by providing a new, computationally usable, catalog information environment about components and their use in applications. It utilizes a rich body of domain knowledge to facilitate access and retrieval of component information. The utility of retrieved information is enhanced by using it to rapidly construct simulation programs and test alternatives, supporting a “try before you buy” paradigm in which users evaluate candidate components within simulations of their design. We describe services provided in the active catalog system to support engineers in selecting and evaluating electromechanical components and subsystems. The services include mechanisms for creating queries for parts based on their intended use rather than merely parametric specifications, refining those queries to take account of constraints imposed by domain knowledge, providing multimodal information to help engineers assess and compare candidate parts, and generating simulation models for candidate parts and integrating them to provide simulation models for candidate systems.

Keywords

Dynamic SimulationElectronic CatalogsMultimodal InformationOntology-Based Search
Type
Research Article
Information
AI EDAM , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , November 2003 , pp. 349 - 366
Copyright
2003 Cambridge University Press

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