Knowledge management is the process through which organisations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. In the context of the Geodise project, encapsulating and exploiting knowledge is the focus of the information and knowledge levels of the grid and enables new designs to be developed more rapidly, or at lower cost. This may be at the level of the analysis codes and resources used, or it can be applied at the design level to guide how to improve or generate new designs.

Key questions in the process of any design optimisation are: what previous designs have been explored and how can I develop them further? What data from the supply chain is germane to the current design? Which optimisation strategies are likely to prove effective? Which computational resources have the analysis codes I require, and when will my results be ready? There are research issues about how to extract information and knowledge from automatically generated databases. Further, these need to be integrated with knowledge gained by formal knowledge elicitation methods and held in rule bases. Design activity creates domain specific knowledge that designers wish to archive and reuse in various ways to enhance their design capabilities in the future. Various knowledge management and re-use tools can be used to underpin this process.

Ontologies