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Long Term Knowledge RetentionAtlantic Meeting

Chris McMahon

University of Bath, 12 February 2007

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The Bath Plug

Id MRC

MACHINE MODELLING & OPTIMISATION

REVERSE ENGINEERING &

METROLOGY

RESPONSIVE MANUFACTURING

PROCESSES & SYSTEMSDESIGN FOR X

CHANGEOVER & SUSTAINABLE

MANUFACTURE

REPRESENTING DESIGN

INFORMATION ORGANISING DESIGN

INFORMATION

USING DESIGN

INFORMATION

Innovative design and Manufacturing Research Centre

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The Importance of Information

• “'Knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices, in the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing.”

• T.D. Wilson, “The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’”, Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002

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The Need for Evidence

• “Most clinical practice is based on limited evidence, mostly in the form of textbook information, obsolete premises, untrustworthy research or case studies, partial or unendorsed reviews, and anecdotal or personal clinical experience. Proven therapies backed by ample evidence are underutilized for lack of knowledge or grasp of available evidence and, often, clinicians do not believe that results observed in clinical trials can be directly translated into clinical practice”

• Rodrigues, R.J., Information systems: the key to evidence-based health practice, Bull World Health Organ vol.78 no.11 Genebra Nov. 2000

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The Need for Evidence

• “Most clinical practice is based on limited evidence, mostly in the form of textbook information, obsolete premises, untrustworthy research or case studies, partial or unendorsed reviews, and anecdotal or personal clinical experience. Proven therapies backed by ample evidence are underutilized for lack of knowledge or grasp of available evidence and, often, clinicians do not believe that results observed in clinical trials can be directly translated into clinical practice”

• Rodrigues, R.J., Information systems: the key to evidence-based health practice, Bull World Health Organ vol.78 no.11 Genebra Nov. 2000

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Context - Product-Service Systems

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Distributed Business

Courtesy Ludo Van Vooren, Exostar

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Diverse Representations

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Proprietary Software

Engineering is dominated by proprietary interests in software and in data and information

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So How Are We Doing?

We need to be able to

1. Record/represent our work and its outcomes – “engineering stuff”

2. Read/interpret different representations of stuff

3. Do (2) reliably into the future

4. Organise and find stuff

5. Maintain, correct, aggregate and discover stuff

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Representing engineering stuff

• Mature (but incomplete and imperfect) representation of product – CAD models; BoM, developed incrementally over 40+ years

• Various representations of process, organisation, rationale, intent etc. – but not agreed or widely applied– Mostly descriptions are in practice embedded in

text documents – reports, minutes, emails . .

Stresses

Analysisguidelines

Analyst

Stressanalysis

Estimated fatigue lifeFatigue

lifeestimation

Geometry

Load cases

Materialsdata

Software &workstation

Stresses

Analysisguidelines

Analyst

Stressanalysis

Estimated fatigue lifeFatigue

lifeestimation

Geometry

Load cases

Materialsdata

Software &workstation

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Read/interpret representations

• Multiple proprietary formats for product representations - but reducing number

• Standards in place or under development for most aspects of product modelling:– STEP, PLCS . . .– Lightweight representations

3D-XML, PLM-XML, JT, X3D– But some bits work better than

others, and adoption is limited

• De facto standards for documents, emerging interest in XML-based approaches.

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Rapid Turnover of Computer Systems

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Read reliably into future

• Much of what has been done with computers is “lost”

• Curation strategies include refreshing, preservation, transfer, emulation, migration, encapsulation – no single approach is the answer

• Practice mainly based on time consuming transfer to new media/new versions of software

• Future through OAIS, but will be very challenging in engineering

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Organise and find stuff

• Mainly based on enumerative classifications/ directory structures/metadata in databases/free text search– “I can never find anything”

• Affordances of traditional paper-based approaches lost

• Emails often very uncontrolled:– need to treat as records and integrate with processes

• Future:– Need equivalent to PageRank for organisational

information– New approaches needed – ontology-driven? faceted

classification? Topic Maps?

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Maintain, update, aggregate, discover

• “The only people who can find information are those that put it there”

• “The only people who can use information are those that have read it”

• Double loop learning is very difficult.• Aggregation is very time consuming• Discovery is impossible

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Murray-Rust “Datuments”

This data is not accessible

computationally

This is not computer

interpretable

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KIM Grand Challenge Project

• Centred on the EPSRC Innovative Manufacturing programme and Innovative Manufacturing Research Centres (IMRCs)

• Project on knowledge and information management through life is one of four funded from October 2005

• £5.5 million (c$10 million) over 3.5 years, 11 University partners, >25 industrial partners.

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Work Packages

Work Package 1Advanced Product

Information Representation & Management

Bath EngineeringCambridgeHeriot-Watt

ImperialLeeds

LoughboroughStrathclyde

UKOLN

Work Package 2Learning

Throughout the Product-Service

Cycle

Bath EngineeringCambridgeLancasterLiverpool

LoughboroughReading

Work Package 3Managing the

Knowledge System Life

Cycle

Bath ManagementCambridge

ImperialLancasterLiverpool

LoughboroughReadingSalford

Work Package 4Integrating Activities

All Partners

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WP1 Tasks

1. To develop combined product, process and rationale models that will allow the capture of extended models of product designs (including records of design trade-offs, results of negotiation, evidence of decision making and details of successful and unsuccessful designs)

2. To develop approaches to design information organisation based on these combined models and on the need to capture feedback from service

3. To explore automated techniques for the capture of design knowledge to reduce the overhead in building the new models.

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