Active Catalog: A Knowledge-Rich Design Library Facilitating Information Consumption

A catalog is a basic resource to a number of people and disciplines ranging from shoppers to companies wanting to sell products. They have traditionally been in paper form and are due for rapid revolution in content and presentation because of the existence of the Internet and the World Wide Web. This paper deals with one component in such a revolution; a component aimed, initially, at aiding the design engineer and later other users.Today’s engineering design methodology, in the search for minimum time-to-market, emphasizes reusing existing reliable components wherever possible. This, in turn, requires components to be described in forms useful to the engineer and in forms that help in finding the information about the component in the first place. It also raises new challenges in support for not only efficiently retrieval of information but also for powerful mechanisms for information evaluation and consumption. Although rich in content, today’s catalogs and libraries of catalogs and other information are poor in using domain knowledge to help designers to access information in catalogs and libraries during the course of a design. Consumption (in the engineering case) requires the descriptive information to be incorporated not only in documents and drawings but also in simulations of as many modalities as are deemed necessary for performing the engineering task.In this paper, we describe a prototype system, ACTIVECATALOG, that utilizes a rich body of domain knowledge to facilitate the access and consumption of library contents. The domain knowledge-base system provides a vocabulary that is at a much higher level of conceptualization than that used by traditional database query or the key-word match technique widely employed by Web applications. Based on the knowledge of the domain and the meaning of the queries specified in this vocabulary, a search engine accesses library components that satisfy the “semantics” defined by the queries. In addition, ACTIVECATALOG, suggested by its name, adds to traditional library contents such as textual and image information, a rich set of models of different modalities. The system, in turn, allows a designer to down-load models, viewers, running code or simulation code to evaluate dynamic and behavioral aspects of a component in a systems environment via interactive simulation before committing the component for prototype or production use.ACTIVECATALOG methodology of use supports a new “Try-Before-You-Buy” methodology.