Challenges for Information Access in Multi-Disciplinary Product Design and Engineering Settings

Abstract

In any larger engineering setting, there is a huge number of documents that engineers and others need to use and be aware of in their daily work. To improve the handling of this amount of documents, we propose to view it under the angle of a new domain for professional search, thus incorporating search engine knowledge into the process. We examine the use of Information Retrieval (IR), Recommender Systems (RecSys), and Knowledge Management (KM) methods in the engineering domain of Knowledge-based Engineering (KBE). The KBE goal is to capture and reuse knowledge in product and process engineering with a systematic method. Based on previous work in professional search and enterprise search, we explore a combination of methods and aim to identify key issues in their application to KBE. We list detected challenges, discuss information needs and search tasks, then focus on issues to solve for a successful integration of the IR and KBE domain and give a system overview of our approach to build a search and recommendation tool to improve the daily information-seeking workflow of engineers in knowledge-intense disciplines. Our work contributes to bridging the gap between Information Retrieval and engineering support systems.