An Architecture for Shared Management of Explicit Knowledge Applied to Product Development Processes

Knowledge management is one of the main challenges in product development processes. This paper proposes an architecture based on which solutions can be implemented in order to share explicit knowledge among partners. The design of the architecture is object-oriented and comprises knowledge insertion and synthesizing methods, knowledge ontology, PD process taxonomy and process modeling methods. The paper also discusses an application of the architecture in the development of a community of interest. The first members are research institutions sharing product development-related knowledge. Industrial partners are expected to become members of the community in the near future.