Establishing information valuing characteristics for engineering design information

Managing information in engineering organizations is facing the particular issue of the ever-increasing volume of information. It has been recognized that an effective methodology is required to evaluate information in order to avoid information overload and to retain the right information for reuse. By using, as a starting point, a number of the current tools and techniques which attempt to evaluate ‘the value’ of information, it is proposed that an assessment or filter mechanism for information can be developed. This paper addresses this issue firstly by briefly reviewing the information overload problem, the definition of value, and related research work on the value of information in various areas. Then a “characteristic” based framework of information evaluation is introduced using the key characteristics identified from related work as an example. In order to quantitatively calculate the quality and value of information, a Bayesian Network diagram method is introduced to the framework to form an evaluation assessment model. Furthermore a decision supported method, with an assorted scoring system is also developed as the basis of the evaluation assessment result. Finally the additional benefits, especially the reversible reasoning inference process are discussed along with the issues of the challenge of the framework and the implementation of evaluation assessment method.