Semantics-based design knowledge annotation and retrieval

Nowadays computer aided tools have enabled the creation of the electronic design documents on an unprecedented scale, while determining and finding what can be reused is like searching a "needle in a haystack." One of the primary reasons for this is that the design knowledge behind the physical design is not properly represented and indexed. With the large amount of designs available, design engineers need to retrieve suitable ones, so that a knowledge-based unified reuse environment can be realized. In this paper, we describe our approach to intelligently annotating and retrieving designs by using ontology engineering and natural language processing. We use the design documents from an engineering design class as the first case study.