International Conference on Engineering Design

A new breed of engineering design tools are electronic design notebooks, which are electronic versions of the traditional engineer’s logbook. They capture design information as it is generated, providing a rich, unfiltered history of a design project. This presents great potential for accessing past design decisions and rationale. This paper examines ways of searching for design information by enhancing existing information retrieval techniques with designspecific thesauri. Previous work examined the generation of thesauri both manually and automatically. While manual methods are still superior to machine methods for creating thesauri, it was found that thesauri extracted from blocks of text performed better than thesauri generated from whole documents. This paper takes up from that point, examining the promise of drawing out a viable design thesaurus from smaller blocks of text to aid in design search.