CHALLENGES IN SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR AEROSPACE DESIGN ENGINEERING

The efficient and effective management of knowledge is becoming increasingly important within the aerospace design engineering sector due to the complexity of product development. The ongoing collaboration of multidisciplinary specialist skills is of necessity for the development of advanced and complex products throughout the aerospace sector. This paper presents various challenges that could hinder the management of knowledge within the aerospace design engineering environment. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that ontological engineering for semantic knowledge management has been proven to be an effective means of structuring and organising complex knowledge. However, various challenges such as the ambiguity of vocabulary, no shared agreement of meaning between design and manufacturing engineers, no formal notation for representing ontologies and engineers not willing to utilise ontological tools for structuring knowledge are detrimental issues hindering the effective management of knowledge within aerospace design engineering.