Interaction as an Issue in the Development of Effective Tools for the Management of the Engineering Knowledge Base

Aim of the present paper is to address the requirements of a subsidiary information level to be integrated into a prototypal system for the dynamic generation and management of process and data models of industrial products described elsewhere [1]. The subsidiary information level is devoted to the association into the basic data structure of additional critical information on: motivations for significant choices, comments, timing and liability data. Such information could be used not only to store the project development history, but also to automatically synthesize implicit interrelations among critical elements of the data structure or of the design process. The integration of such information level into the originally proposed Engineering Knowledge Base architecture is detailed and exemplified, and the adoption of a pre-defined vocabulary of key-words and a syntactic rule interpreter is proposed in order to improve ease of use and effectiveness.