Organizing Information for the Canadian Design Engineering Network

The author reports on a universal searchable index of Web resources for design engineering. The project is part of the Web site for the Canadian Design Engineering Network (CDEN), a recently funded national initiative to provide a mechanism for design engineering practitioners, educators, and others to access recent information on the field, to collaborate, and to help student learn design engineering. The searchable index, the CDEN Online Resource Catalog (CORC) is a simple set of CGI scripts working in conjunction with an existing Web indexing robot (Swish-E), and with a human “reviewer”, to bring online quickly a large portion of the available Web resources on design engineering. Besides its use to provide access to relevant resources, the author intends to use CORC to discover the organizational structure of design engineering information – such a structure could be valuable to both design practitioners and researchers. Proc. WebNet2000 Conference, AACE, San Antonio.