1. 1 Long Term Knowledge Retention Atlantic Meeting Chris McMahon University of Bath, 12 February 2007

2. 2 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 The Bath Plug Id MRC MACHINE MODELLING & OPTIMISATION REVERSE ENGINEERING & METROLOGY RESPONSIVE MANUFACTURING PROCESSES & SYSTEMS DESIGN FOR X CHANGEOVER & SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURE REPRESENTING DESIGN INFORMATION ORGANISING DESIGN INFORMATION USING DESIGN INFORMATION Innovative design and Manufacturing Research Centre

3. 3 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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

4. 4 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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

5. 5 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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

6. 6 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Context - Product-Service Systems

7. 7 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Distributed Business Courtesy Ludo Van Vooren, Exostar

8. 8 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Diverse Representations

9. 9 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Proprietary Software Engineering is dominated by proprietary interests in software and in data and information

10. 10 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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

11. 11 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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..

12. 12 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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.

13. 13 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Rapid Turnover of Computer Systems

14. 14 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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

15. 15 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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?

16. 16 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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

17. 17 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Murray-Rust Datuments This data is not accessible computationally This is not computer interpretable

18. 18 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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.

19. 19 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 KIM Grand Challenge Project To develop tools and techniques for the sustainable representation of product, process and rationale. To develop approaches to learning about the product in service – the performance of the artefact and its impact on users To investigate the dynamics of knowledge use throughout the life-cycle of complex product-service systems, and to make recommendations for improved effectiveness To develop an intellectual framework for the above

20. 20 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 Work Packages Work Package 1 Advanced Product Information Representation & Management Bath Engineering Cambridge Heriot-Watt Imperial Leeds Loughborough Strathclyde UKOLN Work Package 2 Learning Throughout the Product-Service Cycle Bath Engineering Cambridge Lancaster Liverpool Loughborough Reading Work Package 3 Managing the Knowledge System Life Cycle Bath Management Cambridge Imperial Lancaster Liverpool Loughborough Reading Salford Work Package 4 Integrating Activities All Partners

21. 21 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 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.

22. 22 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007 WP1 Technologies

23. 23 LTKR Atlantic, Bath, 12-13 February 2007