A semantic web approach to CE

Collaboration and communication is vital for concurrent engineering and concurrent enterprises. Studies show that members of product development teams spend more and more time for communication, information and document management and have less time for the creative part. Online and off-line collaboration tools address the needs of CE but searching for information and sharing knowledge still follows the old metaphor of knowledge management, i.e. knowledge can only be shared (and accessed) when a common terminology is used. To overcome this limitation, we aim to investigate emerging Semantic Web technologies that offer new possibilities through modelling and using the domain knowledge to better support users of different disciplines to exchange information and knowledge without using the other parties terminology. This paper presents one of the first approaches to tackle information and knowledge sharing by using the latest - still emerging - Semantic Web technologies. We present the system's motivation, architecture and use examples. Furthermore we report on results from user test (done by users from Schenck Pegasus GmbH and Italdesign Giugiaro). We describe the experience that we gathered with the different Semantic Web technologies and give an outlook to future research and development needs.