The architecture for solving the cross-domain keywords during new product development

The team-members for the new product development (NPD) are recruited from different departments in the enterprises. So the team-members in the design teams range from novices to experts in NPD. The juniors developer in the design project team lack more successful product-design experiences as their seniority and skills. Therefore, those developers always query and search their problems with the limited terminology via the information systems or websites. So the results of the querying and searching always are limited to the similar domain-knowledge. The new product development (NPD) involves multidisciplinary knowledge such as accumulated experiences of knowledge-workers, and different technical and legal documents. The information systems (IS) facilitating the NPD processes often include document-based knowledge management system (KMS), Product Data Management (PDM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems etc. With these different systems, novices at various stages of NPD processes often have problems to use the exact and suitable keywords to query the problems from those information systems. The study proposes a case-based reasoning to construct a hierarchical knowledge model to record knowledge-workers' experiences and to store the information of experiences and the recommendation of experts. The aim of the study is that the proposed architecture can query the information scattered in different information systems by using their individual-domain terminology and retrieve the better fitted results of the querying.