A Framework for Design Rationale Retrieval

Design documents contain various types of knowledge and these are useful resources for knowledge reuse. The increasing interest in capturing and reusing such documents is evident as employees in knowledge-intensive areas tend to rely on experience. For example, the majority of engineering designs are related to the modifications of previous proven designs in order to accommodate new requirements. Knowledge reuse depends on the successful retrieval of the required knowledge. It has been difficult to develop efficient retrieval methods especially for the documents created by individuals. When people create documents, they might not consider how the documents can be reused or what information should be accessed. This paper presents a semantic-based retrieval method that understands, organizes and extracts information from documents in a way that mimics human thought (e.g. what are the causes of overheating?). One advantage of this method is that information seekers do not need to worry about selecting right query terms.