Modeling Product Design Knowledge

Corporate memory is a valuable knowledge created by an organization. In research and development organization, product design knowledge made up valuable corporate memory. To ensure the reusability of the corporate memory, the knowledge must be made accessible. However, product development is a project based task and knowledge captured are often kept in silos. This research modeled the product design knowledge through an ontological approach to facilitate the retrieval and sharing of knowledge. The findings discovered that in the product design process, intensified knowledge creation happened in the problem solving phase, and a rich accumulation of tacit and explicit knowledge are embedded in the solutions to the problems. Therefore, in the ontology development, the concepts and relationships are derived from the issues and root causes discovered during the problem solving phase.