This project will demonstrate how the use of PDM systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing.

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services.
If, from a customer perspective, competition and global economy bring a wide, always new choice of cheaper and better products, for the companies these cause pricing pressure, reduced production times and continuous innovation. The result is that companies now require quality, value, speed to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition.

As in other industrial and manufacturing fields, also in the engineering sector, sustaining and maintaining innovative product design is fundamental to the continue success and competitiveness of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which dominate the market in Europe.
This new scenario is pushing engineering companies to fast and efficiently concentrate on acquiring new knowledge and competencies and, in particular, to get maximum return out of their already available knowledge.

On this regard, a number of key factors are crucial for success of an innovative design:

• Improved structure of companies' knowledge assets and formation of an enterprise-wide vocabulary to ensure correct knowledge understanding;

• Identification of an appropriate information management model to explicitly represent enterprises' knowledge;

• Easy and fast information sharing and retrieval among the participants of multi-disciplinary design teams;

• Creation of a culture that promotes knowledge sharing among different companies' parties

Research Goals

This project will demonstrate how the use of PDM systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing.
In particular the project's aim will be the development and the test of a Semantic-based information management system, called SIMI-Pro (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design), to be used by teams of industrial designers and product engineers.
The implementation of SIMI-Pro will offer the unique occasion to investigate the capabilities of modern PDM systems in combination with emerging Semantic networking technologies and to employ the associated standards and tools currently under development.
The final outcome will be a system capable to answer efficiently the demands of industrial designers and product engineers involved in product design, and ultimately capable to improve the result of the final product.