KW4ED
Workshop on Knowledge Management and Semantic Web for Engineering Design

In conjunction with K-CAP 2007
28th October 2007
Whistler, British Columbia, Canada

Call for Papers

Knowledge management becomes an important issue to "Small to Medium Entreprises" (SMEs) since most part of the industrial engineering innovations come from practical expertise in SMEs. The knowledge is partly implicit and not formalised as in major companies where production standards (norms, protocols, etc.) are very well established. In order to capture engineer' skills, and to ease their industrial design process, support may be given by knowledge management techniques.

The task consists of capturing explicit and tacit knowledge of an SME in terms of access, sharing, and reuse of that knowledge as well as creation of new knowledge and organisational learning. All the process management must be transparent and generic enough to be used by different user profiles of SME organisational departments: design engineering, but also management, sales, production, etc. Underlying techniques should deal with heterogeneous resources: including documents, CAD drawings, relational databases, data warehouses, 3D views, and virtual reality motion scenes.

FP6 European co-funded STREP project SevenPro (Semantic Virtual Engineering Environment for Product Design) aims at addressing this issue. The ongoing SevenPro project develops technologies and tools supporting deep mining of product engineering knowledge from multimedia repositories and enabling semantically enhanced 3D virtual reality (VR) interaction with product knowledge in integrated engineering environments. It combines both knowledge management and semantic web approach based on semantic annotations of design memory.

This workshop is organised by the Sevenpro consortium, in order to gather active research and industrial actors in the domain of design engineering, in knowledge management, in semantic web, in data mining and knowledge discovery in order to discuss all the issues linked to combination of knowledge management and semantic web for management of knowledge resources handled in engineering design.

Papers are welcome in any area related to one of the following questions (not exhaustive):

• How to build and use an ontology useful for engineering?
• How to build a semantically annotated and semantically accessible project memory?
• How to annotate semantically a design memory: textual documents, multimedia documents, CAD drawing, virtual reality objects?
• How to browse and use an heterogeneous semantic design memory?
• How to extract information and retrieval from a design memory?
• How to mine a design memory?
• How to discover design patters from a design memory?
• How to integrate semantic descriptions and virtual reality?
• How to reason about a design memory?
• How to offer semantic web services for engineering design?
• How to compare knowledge management approaches used in major companies and in SMEs?
• How to support cooperation among a designers' team intra or inter SMEs?
• How to support skills management in engineering design?
• How to support a community of designers?
• How to combine standards used in design to those used in semantic Web?

Workshop interests

The workshop is related to the overall topic of K-CAP by means of knowledge capture and Semantic Web technologies. However, it is differentiating by focusing on design engineering and by tackling semantic annotations of multimedia documents, CAD and virtual reality. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the workshop, we expect interesting discussions and exchange of different views from the involved participants, submission and invited speakers. Specifically, this workshop expects to:

• Bring together the different research communities involved;
• Provide an overview of the state of the art by examining recent trends in the field, alongside with open problems;
• Incite to create new collaborations among the participants.

Workshop format

The workshop will be organized in three parts:

• Selected papers submitted to the program committee;
• A number of invited talks (for example, speakers from other relevant projects studying similar subjects);
• A panel discussion with participants.

This session will foster the exchange of ideas, discussions, clustering, or collaborations.

The workshop will be held on the 28th October 2007 at The Fairmont Chateau Whistler. The main conference will be held from the 29th to the 31st of October 2007.

Enquiries to:

Hacene Cherfi AND Olivier Corby AND Rose Dieng-Kuntz

"{hacene.cherfi, olivier.corby, rose.dieng} AT sophia.inria.fr"

Alternatively, you can use this organiser's list: "kw4ed AT sophia.inria.fr"