Emails in engineering design projects: An approach for analysing their information content

James Wasiak, Ben Hicks, Linda Newnes, Andy Dong

Research output: Chapter or section in a book/report/conference proceedingChapter in a published conference proceeding

7 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

It is increasingly recognised that a large amount of potentially valuable information created during the engineering design process is contained in less formal sources, such as log books and emails. Hence there is a requirement to improve the capture, management and re-use of these sources. However it is first necessary to understand the nature of the information in order to effectively achieve this. The research reported in this paper deals with the creation of an approach for assessing the information content of emails, in particular, those associated with design projects. The development of this approach, grounded in a wide range of existing literature and derived from iterative applications to an industrial dataset is presented. The approach considers three perspectives: what the subject of the email is, why the email is being sent and how its content is expressed. The application of this method to a 700 email corpus from a software design project is described. Key findings from this are presented and discussed, with respect to the character of the content and the project lifecycle.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication5th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology, DET 2008
EditorsAlain Bernard
PublisherPublibook
Pages111-124
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9782748345988
ISBN (Print)9782748345988
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2008
Event5th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology, DET 2008 - Nantes, France
Duration: 22 Oct 200824 Oct 2008

Conference

Conference5th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology, DET 2008
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityNantes
Period22/10/0824/10/08

Keywords

  • Design information
  • Email
  • Information characteristics
  • Information content
  • Project management

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems
  • Software

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