Retrieving Knowledge using Semantic Technology
Research Theme: Knowledge Management
Engineering design is a collaborative process that involves different perspectives and knowledge from diverse disciples and a shared understanding of the products being designed. Enriching information with well-defined semantics can help designer’s access and query distributed and heterogeneous information.
Motivation
Simple look-up retrieval is not suitable as design rationales are situated knowledge. Dependency information is crucial for reuse as it shows which parts of rationales are relevant to current situations. For effective rationale retrieval, advanced techniques based on human language technology are required.
Objectives
- To understand how the information retrieved from distributed documents canbe semantically linked to provide an integrated view of related information To develop a retrieval method that enables natural language queries alongwith a graphical navigation of related information.
Method
This research uses computational linguistic theory, ontology-based information extraction and natural language processing techniques. It is also based on a corpus analysis.
Findings
Prototype software, called DRedQA, has been developed and tested that demonstrates how semantic-based information modelling can improve better retrieval of design documents.
Acknowledgements
This project is being undertaken in collaboration with Rolls-Royce plc.
Support for this project is provided by the Rolls-Royce plc and the EPSRC.
