Editorial for the special issue of knowledge discovery and management in engineering design and manufacturing

Knowledge discovery and management using various advancedtechniques,e.g.data\text\web\multimediamining, computational neuroscience, ontology, and corporate search engine, inengineeringdesignandmanufacturinghasemerged as a very new research area. Engineering design and manufacturing professionals are eager to enhance their information processing and knowledge management capabilities by adopting these advanced knowledge techniques. A series of challenging topics have emerged, including for example, the effectivemanagement of designknowledge inglobal contexts (e.g. outsourcing) at both personal and enterprisewide levels, knowledge integration from individual manufacturing processes into advanced systems through the application of data or textmining and ontology, and how to enhance the agility of manufacturing enterprises through the latest research in artificial intelligence, informatics, WWW and knowledge management.ThisSpecial Issueis thereforededicatedtoinnovative, state-of-the-art research, technologydevelopment and applications of knowledge discovery and management in the broad context of design andmanufacturing. Thefirst paper, “DataMining inManufacturing:AReview Based on the Kind of Knowledge” by Choudhary, Harding and Tiwari, provides a comprehensive survey of the current state of data mining applications in manufacturing industry with a special emphasis on the kind of knowledge mined and the corresponding data mining functions dedicated to fulfill such discovery activities, including concept character-