During the practical use of Design Automation (DA) System in a company, the lack of assistance from either documentation work about the whole system or management of knowledge could bring out some obstacles when engineers reuse existing knowledge and information. The purpose of this project is to explore an approach of documentation and knowledge management in DA System. The study is mainly based on the actual case of seat heater DA system developed by JTH. Based on preset functional requirement for the potential solution, several principles and methods of documentation and knowledge management are introduced such as MOKA, CommonKADS, SysML and PVM. A number of useful applications such as DRed (Design Rationale Editor), PC PACK, Sementic MediaWiki and Product Model Manager became candidates solutions for this project. The selection of final approach was Sementic MediaWiki, and this is based on the comparison of the result from evaluation of functionality of each application. Due to specificity of documentation on the DA system, the “process based” approa­ch­ had been used for structuring system included knowledge instead of using a systematical method like either MOKA or CommonKADS completely. Setting up interconnection between different knowledge objects was one of the most important tasks in this project because it enables capturing and retrieving of knowledge. Sementic MediaWiki, a powerful text representative and web-based tool has been used as a platform of representing the whole knowledge and information. With its implementation, the performance of Sementic MediaWiki had been tested accor­ding to the preset functional requirement. After a slight refine process to the solution, the satisfactory result had been achieved, and also proved the applicability of Sementic Wiki in such kind of project.

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guidescover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world. At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computertechnologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesisexamines the state of the art in field guides for plants. First, a framework isestablished for evaluating both printed and digital field guides. Second, fourprint and three digital field guides are evaluated against the criteria. Third, anovel digital field guide is presented and evaluated.

The World Wide Web contains a vast amount of information. This feature makes it a very useful part of our everyday activities but the information contained within is made up of an exponentially increasing repository of semantically unstructured data. The semantic web movement involves the evolution of the existing World Wide web in order to enable computers make meaning of and understand the data they process and consequently increase their processing capabilities. Over the past decade a number of new projects implementing the semantic web technology have been developed albeit still in their infancy. These projects are based on semantic data models and one such is the Wikidata project. The Wikidata project is targeted at providing a more semantic platform for editing and sharing data throughout the Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities. This project studies how the Wikidata project facilitates such a semantic platform for the Wikimedia communities and includes the development of an application utilizing the semantic capabilities of Wikidata. The objective of the project is to develop an application capable of retrieving and presenting statistical data and also be able to make missing or invalid data on Wikidata detectable. The result is an application currently aimed at researchers and students who require a convenient tool for statistical data collection and data mining projects. Usability and performance tests of the application are also conducted with the results presented in the report. Keywords: Semantic web, World Wide Web, Semantic data model, Wikidata, data mining.

This thesis work is based on the previous researches in design automation at Sandvik Coromant. The concept of product family description (PFD) has been introduced to the company to improve documentation of knowledge in engineering design process. Current documentation at the company for engineering design covers mostly the design definition part of the knowledge. PFD is constituted by design definition and completed by design rationale. This kind of documentation improves reusing, revising and expanding the knowledge at the company. On the other side, PFD is an input for design programming and a good engineering design description for a product provides more efficiency in design programming. The project is started by a survey for several principles and applications for knowledge modelling. Product variant master (PVM) and Semantic MediaWiki are selected by the results of the survey. To show the concept of PVM, modelling of a test product is done in product model manager (PMM) software. The main part of the project is setting up product family description (PFD) by capturing design rationale for the test product, implementing in Semantic MediaWiki. Since the design rationale is not documented, it was recorded during several meetings with the designer of the test product. The description is completed by including the argumentations about the rules, figures, dimensions and etc. Also in the project has been tried to improve and revise the description to make it more simple and efficient. Another objective of the project is to show Semantic MediaWiki as a candidate application for modelling knowledge at the company. In this step the applicability and functionality of both PFD and Semantic MediaWiki is seen. In the next stage the project findings and company documentation are evaluated. In this step has been tried to show the pros and cons of the project. The emphasis of the evaluation is on PFD and the alternative application. In the end a conclusion of the whole methods and findings of the project comes with discussion with people who were involved in this work.