Integration possibilities of a context-based search engine into a project planning portal in the mechanical engineering domain

Product development processes in the mechanical engineering field are getting more and more complex while the requirements of cost and time reduction increase. Thus, there is an increasing necessity to support engineering designers by doing their everyday work. The paper has the aim to show a way to integrate a framework for contextsensitive information retrieval into a project planning portal. This kind of software targets the successful execution of processes in enterprises and facilitates cooperation between the involved project teams. The included search functionality often is insufficient for the companies goals: promotion of reuse of existing parts and information like best practice and lessons learned documents. The proposed extended search functionality includes context information about both the engineering designer himself and the documents to anticipate the user’s information need and thus improve the quality of the retrieval results. Amongst others, especially process and workflow information is gathered to supply adequate information for the current working task of the engineering designer.