Toward a Knowledge Mediumfor Collaborative Product Development

Information sharing and decision coordination are central problems for large-scale product development. This paper proposes a framework for supporting a knowledge medium 32]: a computational environment in which explicitly represented knowledge serves as a communication medium among people and their programs. The framework is designed to support information sharing and coordinated communication among members of a product development organization, particularly for the tasks of design knowledge capture, dynamic notiication of design changes, and active management of design dependencies. The proposed technology consists of a shared knowledge representation (language and vocabulary), protocols for foreign data encapsulation and posting to the shared environment, and mechanisms for content-directed routing of posted information to interested parties via subscription and notiication services. A range of possible applications can be explored in this framework, depending on the degree of commitment to a shared representation by participating tools. A number of research issues, fundamental to building such a knowledge medium, are introduced in the paper.