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Tech Report kmi-01-09 Abstract


Towards a Framework for Acquisition of Design Knowledge
Techreport ID: kmi-01-09
Date: 2001
Author(s): Martin Dzbor and Zdenek Zdrahal
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Engineering design is a knowledge-intensive process driven by various design objectives. Design is an iterative process where the objectives evolve together with the solutions in order to deliver an artefact with the desired properties and functions. Many design theories developed so far suggest more or less efficient ways for finding a suitable solution to the given goals. However, they often leave open the issue of 'solution talk-back'. Discovery of new design objectives and amendment of the existing ones is as important as the development of design solutions. The biggest issue with solution talkback is the presence of tacit knowledge in addition to the explicit one. This paper draws on a theory that incorporates some typical features of design problems, and transfers theoretical findings about reflection on the design actions to a tool for acquisition of design knowledge. First, key terms are defined and theoretical framework is introduced. Afterwards we look at the means for capturing explicit and tacit design knowledge more in depth.

Publication(s):

27th Design Automation Conference (part of ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences), September 2001, Pittsburgh, USA
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.