Biologically Meaningful Keywords for Functional Terms of the Functional Basis

Biology is recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural-language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords could not always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a retrieval algorithm was developed to identify potential biologically meaningful keywords that are more effective in searching biological text than corresponding engineering keywords. In our current work, we applied and refined the retrieval algorithm to translate functional terms of the functional basis into biologically meaningful keywords. The functional basis is widely accepted as a standardized representation of engineering product functionality. Therefore, our keywords could serve as a thesaurus for engineers to find biological analogies relevant to their design problems. We also describe specific semantic relationships that can be used to identify biologically meaningful keywords in excerpts describing biological phenomena. These semantic relations were applied as criteria to identify the most useful biologically meaningful keywords. Through a preliminary validation experiment, we observed that different translators were able to apply the criteria to identify biologically meaningful keywords with a high degree of agreement to those identified by the authors. In addition, we describe how fourth-year undergraduate mechanical engineering students used the biologically meaningful keywords to develop concepts for their design projects. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003249

[1]  Yan Jin,et al.  Creative Stimulation in Conceptual Design , 2002 .

[2]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Biomimetic design through natural language analysis to facilitate cross-domain information retrieval , 2007, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[3]  Kristin L. Wood,et al.  Innovations in Design Through Transformation: A Fundamental Study of Transformation Principles , 2009 .

[4]  Yoseph Bar-Cohen,et al.  Biomimetics—using nature to inspire human innovation , 2006, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[5]  J. Vincent,et al.  Biomimetics: its practice and theory , 2006, Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

[6]  D. Gentner,et al.  Systematicity as a selection constraint in analogical mapping , 1991 .

[7]  Marie-Josée Potvin,et al.  BIOMIMETIC DESIGN OF A MULTI-LAYERED DUST PROTECTION SYSTEM FOR OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS OPERATING IN THE LUNAR ENVIRONMENT , 2011 .

[8]  Li Shu,et al.  Sensing in nature: using biomimetics for design of sensors , 2008 .

[9]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Bridging Cross-Domain Terminology for Biomimetic Design , 2005 .

[10]  Stephen H. Baer.  Mental leaps: Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 265 pp., $24.95, hardcover , 1995 .

[11]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Biomimetic Concept Generation Applied to Design for Remanufacture , 2002 .

[12]  Janet C. Read,et al.  Evaluating Children's Interactive Products: Principles and Practices for Interaction Designers , 2008 .

[13]  Amaresh Chakrabarti,et al.  A functional representation for aiding biomimetic and artificial inspiration of new ideas , 2005, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[14]  Kristin L. Wood,et al.  Development of a Functional Basis for Design , 2000 .

[15]  K. Holyoak,et al.  The analogical mind. , 1997, The American psychologist.

[16]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Using descriptions of biological phenomena for idea generation , 2008 .

[17]  David W. Rosen,et al.  Systematic Reverse Engineering of Biological Systems , 2007 .

[18]  Ashok K. Goel.  Design, Analogy, and Creativity , 1997, IEEE Expert.

[19]  K.K.B. Hon,et al.  Knowledge Brokering for Assisting the Generation of Automotive Product Design , 2004 .

[20]  Hans Nørgaard Hansen,et al.  Case Study in Biomimetic Design: Handling and Assembly of Microparts , 2006 .

[21]  Jonathan Cagan,et al.  The role of timing and analogical similarity in the stimulation of idea generation in design , 2008 .

[22]  D. Rebholz-Schuhmann,et al.  Facts from Text—Is Text Mining Ready to Deliver? , 2005, PLoS biology.

[23]  Simon Szykman,et al.  A functional basis for engineering design: Reconciling and evolving previous efforts , 2002 .

[24]  D. Gentner,et al.  The analogical mind : perspectives from cognitive science , 2001 .

[25]  Ashok K. Goel,et al.  Compound Analogical Design: Interaction between Problem Decomposition and Analogical Transfer in Biologically Inspired Design , 2008 .

[26]  Nathalie Bonnardel,et al.  Towards understanding and supporting creativity in design: analogies in a constrained cognitive environment , 2000, Knowl. Based Syst..

[27]  Robert L. Nagel,et al.  Exploring the Use of Functional Models in Biomimetic Conceptual Design , 2008 .

[28]  L. H. Shu,et al.  Effective Analogical Transfer Using Biological Descriptions Retrieved With Functional and Biologically Meaningful Keywords , 2009 .

[29]  Ying Liu,et al.  Using WordNet to Disambiguate Word Senses for Text Classification , 2007, International Conference on Computational Science.

[30]  Kevin Otto,et al.  Product Design: Techniques in Reverse Engineering and New Product Development , 2000 .

[31]  L. H. Shu,et al.  TOWARDS BIOMIMETIC CONCEPT GENERATION , 2001 .

[32]  W. K. Purves.  Life: The Science of Biology , 1985 .

[33]  Maurice Waite.  The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus , 1996 .