Social tagging as a knowledge collecting strategy in the engineering design change process

This article focuses on analysing the feasibility of using social tagging as a tool for knowledge collection and retrieval in the context of the product development process (PDP). This process is a social activity that involves groups of individuals who share a common goal: 'to design a product'. Traditional knowledge-based systems (KBS) are not very well suited to capture the tacit knowledge that is embedded in this process. Social tagging is proposed in this article as the mechanism to externalize the tacit knowledge about the best CAD modelling strategies between the design team members. This knowledge is especially relevant for the management of 'engineering change orders' because this process is closely related to the modelling methodology used to create the three-dimensional (3D) CAD models that have to be adapted to accomplish a specific design modification. In order to analyse the feasibility of this approach, an experimental study was conducted to understand the tagging process in this context and the benefit of using this information in the modification procedure of 3D CAD models. Preliminary experimental results show that tagging represents a feasible approach to support knowledge collection on best CAD modelling practices.