Information organizing and sharing method in business media service for virtual manufacturing enterprise

Progressive information technology requires manufacturers produce higher quality and lower cost products and get them to market faster. In the future, a business society may be formed with virtual enterprise in which each company divides the work in collaboration and shares the results of the product idea and scheduling. Hence, business media infrastructures are required where each company promotes effective data exchange, information delivery and sharing. We propose a system architecture providing service composed of network, service and application layers. We propose an information organizing and sharing method for distributed task information. Information is searched by selectively gathering relevant words. Meta-data describing the relation between gathered data are created and mutually connected with one another using the task model defined by the task procedure. The meta-data refers to knowledge information for the retrieval of design task information. Meta-knowledge composed of the mentioned task model and gathered data, which is stored in a common database, results in viewpoint sharing of a company´s internal and external information. This method is adapted to a product design task for an example implementation. We present the design information organizing and sharing method and a prototype of a retrieval support system for design task information. This system enables us to quickly retrieve the task adapted information from a large number of design documents that contain design processes.