Support for design knowledge management and sharing using XML

Within modern industrial environments design activities have increasingly evolved into a knowledge intensive process. This knowledge is derived not only from core engineering issues, but also the business activities of the company. With the accumulation of this knowledge, the trend is to incorporate it in new or redesign activities, thus reducing design time and overall process costs. Supporting this trend frameworks approaches and tools are being developed to understand the basic requirements of modern industry and to aid the use of such valuable design knowledge and information.
This chapter presents a review of mark-up languages employed for design activities also a brief overview of the industrial demands of the modern design process is described. Further this chapter presents the latest research being conducted at the University of Bath. This work has covered the long term preservation of design knowledge and information, the capture and maintenance of design constraints and, small scale Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools. The common basis for all these topics has been the application of XML in the development of tools and approaches.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of the works presented along with future directions for both industrial and academic researchers and practitioners to follow.