Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2023
Representation of design information using causal ontologies is very effective for creative ideation in product design. Hence researchers created databases with models of engineering and biological systems using causal ontologies. Manually building many models using technical documents requires significant effort by specialists. Researchers worked on the automatic extraction of design information leveraging the computational techniques of Machine Learning. But these methods are data intensive, have manual touch points and have not yet reported the end-to-end performance of the process. In this paper, we present the results of a new method inspired by the cognitive process followed by specialists. This method uses the Knowledge Graph with Rule based reasoning for information extraction for the SAPPhIRE causality model from natural language texts. Unlike the supervised learning methods, this new method does not require data intensive modelling. We report the performance of the end-to-end information extraction process, which is found to be a promising alternative.