Semantic Relationship Based Knowledge Management and Reuse in Collaborative Product Development

Latest technological advances, driven by an increased industrial competitiveness, lead to the development of more complex technical products, which implement technologies from multiple fields of expertise (mechanics, electronics...). The successful design of such kind of products requires the ability of the involved team to communicate, collaborate and integrate their knowledge and know how. This usually causes data integrity problems, making it more difficult to access product information and knowledge distributed in various and heterogeneous systems, for knowledge management and reuse purposes. In such a context of knowledge management, methods and tools for information extraction and visualization play a major role, given their capacity to extract, represent and organize engineering information and knowledge throughout product lifecycle. The paper proposes a semantic relationship based management approach to improve product Beginning Of Life (BOL).