K-brief and context driven access: Providing context related information to product developers in high quality

Identifying necessary and helpful information in context of a concrete task remains a challenge, even though different information and data management systems are in use to support product development and production processes. This paper addresses the key challenge of providing contextual information of a high quality (e.g. in defined maturity). With current systems, the user (the product developer) is forced to transfer a need for specific information into an appropriate query: He/she must have a well-defined overview on existing information management systems, each providing specific search possibilities. As a possible solution, this paper presents two joined concepts: Knowledge-Briefs are proposed to be used to represent product development related knowledge in a condensed manner (similar to design guidelines). These Knowledge-Briefs are based on predefined templates, providing sections as information containers. The Knowledge-Briefs are linked to a so-called Context-Driven Access (the second concept). The core idea of this approach is to proactively provide supporting information, based on an autonomously identified context. To capture such context an information model is proposed, based on description languages. This way, users will be supported with one or more relevant Knowledge-Briefs throughout their work processes, which cover relevant information for the actual tasks they are working on.