Applying context to organize unstructured information in aerospace industry
Yifan Xie, Steve J. Culley, Frithjof Weber · 2011
A large portion of information created in business activity is unstructured with much useful information buried inside. Within the aerospace industry, an added challenge is that long product lifecycles require such unstructured information to be accessible over a long period of time. In this paper, the authors have examined and identified promising techniques that can collectively contribute to better organization of unstructured information. Two industrial case studies were conducted to examine current practices of organizing unstructured information in respective engineering departments. As a result, key challenges in organizing and dealing with the unstructured information elements within engineering setting are identified. Subsequently, a set of requirements of a desired intelligent system is developed. These requirements are then used to guide the design of an example Context Based Search Platform which demonstrates promising potential for dealing with multi-dimensional and complex data sets that all engineers have to deal with.