CoLinK: Cooperative knowledge management for engineering teams

Due to today's increasingly complex processes in planning and design, AM knowledge management (KM) is becoming a crucial factor of success in the engineering sector. In a participatory design project we created a prototype for a process oriented KM system (CoLinK), which allows engineers to jointly model projects with generic process descriptions, creating a virtual engineering community within the enterprise and beyond. During every project these process descriptions will be augmented with knowledge annotations. The CoLinK system includes a document as well as contact management module and lets users semantically link the corresponding information in the process context. With any finished project m engineers can utilize the acquired knowledge to cooperatively improve the quality of the generic process descriptions.