Capturing Design Rationale by Annotating E-mails

Development of a large and complex system, such as satellites, is a knowledge intensive task. Applying knowledge management to such a domain appears to lead to a more efficient development process. However, it has been reported that knowledge management suffers from capture bottleneck, i.e. lack of incentives for members of the community to invest time in sharing their resources, or knowledge. In this paper, we propose an approach to capture design rationale from e-mail communication. We describe the prototype system and analysis of applying the method to an e-mail archive of a satellite development project.