Enhancing Virtual Product Representations for Advanced Design Repository Systems

This paper describes the transformation of an existing set of heterogeneous product knowledge into a coherent design repository that supports product information archival, storage and reuse. Existing product information was analyzed and compared against desired outputs to ascertain what information management structure was needed to produce design resources pertinent to the design process. Several test products were cataloged to determine what information was essential without being redundant in representation. This set allowed for the creation of a novel single application point of entry for product information that maintains data consistency and allows information be easily exported. The exported information takes on many forms that are valuable to the design process such as a bill of materials and component function matrix. Enabling technologies include commercial software, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data, XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) transformation sheets and HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Through this process researchers at the University of Missouri – Rolla (UMR) have been able to dramatically improve the way in which artifact data is gathered, recorded and used.