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| Objectives |
| Community Added Value |
| Contribution to EC policies |
| Social Objectives |
| Innovation |
| Work Plan |
WIDE aims to improve innovative
product design by applying emerging Semantic Web (SW) techniques to
develop and test an effective information management and knowledge sharing
system for multi-disciplinary design teams. The WIDE system will support
the effective and efficient inter-working of industrial designers and
engineers by offering a natural and coherent environment for identifying
information needs, finding and accessing different information sources,
receiving and viewing information from the different sources and relating
the results to the current state of the ongoing designing. In doing
so, WIDE puts to a real test the emerging SW techniques and identifies
where further work is needed to actually achieve the much greater levels
of machine aided decision support needed in today's fast moving, short
time scale, innovative product design activities.
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Community
added value
WIDE will develop
and test, using real applications, a design information management and
knowledge sharing system, built upon the emerging Semantic Web technologies,
that will pioneer the effective support of information management and
knowledge sharing in designing, using technologies that will shortly
become available and affordable to all. It can therefore be expected
that the WIDE system will have a significant impact on the practice,
methods, efficiency and quality of future product designing.
WIDE also provides an early and significant test of the emerging Semantic
Web technologies, and thereby will influence its future (near term)
development. Given that Semantic Web technologies are likely to become
very widely used very quickly, this kind of early testing against real
applications is of particular importance to the community as a whole.
The adoption and use, in the WIDE project, of Semantic Web standards
and proto-standards, will also afford an important validity test of
these standards, and so help ground further discussion and development
in some real results and experience.
The WIDE project's contribution to the future use and development of
Semantic Web technologies, and to the innovative application and use
of ontologies, will help keep Europe at the front of ontology theory,
technology, and practice.
Showing how information technology can be used to bring disjoint groups
of people, industrial designers and product engineers in this case,
to work and collaborate effectively together, will act as a positive
example of how information technology can be applied to good effect,
rather than just change what people have to do in order to continue
to do their jobs.
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Contribution
to EC policies
The IST Program objectives are
the main EC policy elements in the area of Semantic Web technologies.
This has four inter-related specific objectives, the last three of which
are relevant to the WIDE project.
"For Europe's enterprises, workers and consumers, the objective
is to enable individuals and organizations to innovate and be more effective
and efficient in their work, thereby providing the basis for sustainable
growth and high added-value employment while also improving the quality
of working life."
The WIDE design information management
and knowledge sharing system will directly contribute to this policy
objective by supporting both individuals (designers and engineers) to
be more innovative, effective, and efficient in their work. By improving
the collaborative effectiveness of teams of industrial designers and
product engineers, it will also help improve high added-value product
design, and, at the same time, improve the day-to-day relationship between
industrial designers, product engineers, and their managers, and thus
improve the quality of the working lives of these kinds of people.
"In the sector of multimedia content, the key objective is to confirm
Europe as a leading force, realizing its full potential."
Since the WIDE system will be based upon Semantic Web technologies,
it will naturally be a multimedia content using system. Its development
will thus help further European understanding and expertise in the area
of multimedia content and its use, thus helping to keep Europe a "leading
force" in this important area.
"For the enabling technologies which are the foundation of the
information society, the program objective is to drive their development,
enhance their applicability and accelerate their take-up in Europe."
The emerging Semantic Web technologies will become one of the major
enabling technologies of the information society. The WIDE project's
use and application of these technologies to a real problem will thus
directly contribute to driving their development, enhancing their applicability,
and to accelerating their take-up in Europe.
The WIDE project will also directly contribute to the wider EC policy
on standardization and the use of standards by adopting and applying
Semantic Web standards wherever and whenever possible. This will help
directly to both promote these standards and to full their further application.
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Social
objectives
Improving
the quality of life
By actively supporting the information needs and knowledge
sharing in product design the WIDE system will bring industrial designers
and product designers closer together and reduce traditional tensions
and conflicts of interests between them, thus helping to improve the
quality of their working lives. Since the quality of the lives of everybody
in all EU member states, as in other developed countries around the
world, is dominated by the designed environment in which they live,
an improvement in the quality of the design of new products will have
a direct impact on the quality of lives of everybody. Better designs
of the things we use, the places we live, work, and play in, and of
the services we use is the single most important way to improve the
quality of the lives of the most people.
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Improving
health and safety
Similarly, the quality of the products people use in their
lives has an impact on their health and safety. By supporting the information
management and knowledge sharing needs of industrial designers and product
engineers, the WIDE system will contribute to a general improvement
of new product designs, and thus to an improvement in the health and
safety of the people who use them.
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Improving Employment
Improving employment
necessarily requires sustaining and maintaining the viability of existing
companies, and in particular of the small to medium size enterprises
that dominates the economies of most EU member states. It is still the
case, in Europe, that most new jobs are created by existing companies,
rather than by starting up new ones. For existing companies to survive
the impact of further globalization of more markets, they must become
more innovative and efficient in their product designing. The WIDE system
seeks to directly and explicitly do this. Achieving this will therefore
help to both preserve existing jobs and lead to the creation of new
ones.
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Added
value of products
Value is added to products when more people want them, can
use them, and are willing and able to buy them. This translates directly
in to better quality designs of products, which, in turn, depends upon
improving the designing. The WIDE system seeks to directly and explicitly
support better quality and more innovative designing of new products.
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Preserving/Enhancing
the environment and natural resources
Preserving and enhancing the environment and natural resources
depends upon using less natural resources and producing less undesirable
and dangerous by products in the process. Consuming less natural resources
in better ways to make new products depends upon designing those products
so that they use less resources in their use and operation and use less
resources in their manufacture and fabrication. This requires that designers
have better access to the information and knowledge needed to do this
at design time. The WIDE system seeks to directly and explicitly support
this aspect of product design.
Preserving and enhancing the environment and natural resources also
depends upon using more recycled materials and resources. This depends
upon designing new products so that they use more recycled materials
and resources in their manufacture and fabrication. And, again, this
requires that designers have better access to the information and knowledge
needed to do this at design time. The WIDE system seeks to directly
and explicitly support this aspect of product design.
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Innovation
Information management
and knowledge sharing in multidisciplinary design teams - Different
people can speak different languages, work together and share their
knowledge without having all to speak a common language. This means
that a sufficient understanding of the other's language, without an
ability to speak it, can form a sufficient basis for an effective collaborative
working and for sharing knowledge. The WIDE project takes this multi-language
plus cross-understanding idea as the basis for it's model of support
of industrial designers and product engineers who must work together
and share knowledge effectively and efficiently, although they speak
quite different technical languages and came from quite different professionals
cultures. This thus represents an innovative approach to effective knowledge
sharing in product design, and is quite different from the more classical
knowledge management approaches, which seek to have everybody involved
speak the same language.
Process ontology as the support the WIDE core system - Ontology's concept
defines what things exist, in some domain, what properties they have,
and how the different entities are related. They are intended to support
human interpretation of information about the domain covered by the
ontology, and to support machine processing of the same information.
The importance of ontologies as an essential component of semantic web,
has brought a convergence work on ontology specification and web based
specification languages. The WIDE system will aim to use the emerging
standards and tools in this area, such as XML and XMLS, RDF and RDFS,
together with OIL (Ontology Inference layer) and DDAML (DARPA Agent
Markup Language). The WIDE project will be one of the first projects
to develop and use process ontology as a key element of its information
management and knowledge sharing system for product design.
Definition of the design process ontology - This process will define
the different kinds of knowledge used and generated during designing,
together with their roles and relations. The design process ontology
will then be used by the system to identify what kinds of knowledge
are being requested, used, added, or shared by users of the system,
and to identify what other kinds of design knowledge could be relevant
to the current design activity or activities. WIDE design process ontology
will therefore be based upon an existing Knowledge Level theory of design
process which as been specifically developed to support the knowledge
engineering of design support systems. This theory identifies, at a
general level, the different kinds of knowledge used and generated in
designing, the roles this kind of knowledge play in the process as a
whole, and the relationship as a whole.
Application of emerging Semantic Web technologies - Using the Semantic
Web as the basis for a system to support information management and
knowledge sharing in product design thus represents a challenging and
serious test of the technologies involved. The WIDE system will thus
pioneer the way towards the use of Semantic Web technologies in effective
support of information management and knowledge sharing in design and
in other areas of modern business.
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Work
Plan
The user and technical requirements
and the system specification serve as a basis for the technical development
of the system that comprises a two-phase implementation of the content
repository level, the meta level and of the user interface components.
The following table summarizes
the different partners' strengths and competencies
|
Nº.
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PARTNER
|
BRANCH
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MAIN SKILLS
|
|
1
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FhG/IGD
|
Research
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Web-Technology,
Knowledge Management, Database Technology
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2
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IDG
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Automotive
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Industrial
design/Product Engineering/Car development from the styling phase
to the start of production
|
|
3
|
VICOMTech
|
Research
|
Ontology
theory and application
|
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4
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CEFRIEL
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Research
|
Software
architecture,middleware infrastruc ture, mobile agents,web systems,knowledgemanagement
|
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5
|
Schenck
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Mechatronics
|
Development
of Test and Automation Systems,Software development
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6
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CCG
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Research
|
User interfaces,
navigation structures,Web and Database Technology, Knowledge Management
|