Principles for Enabling Access to Engineering Design Information Through Life – Building Curation into the Records

The ability to support products (be they artefacts or services) over extended lifecycles is to a great extent dependent upon the ability to maintain complete records of the design, manufacture and ultimately operation of such products.

This task is, in essence, one of curation, where efforts must be expended in ensuring that these records are managed in such a manner that their original content and intent is clear to subsequent users of each entity within the record.

In order to achieve this, it is essential that these records are constructed in such a manner as to adequately capture required detail and ensure these remain accessible and comprehensible to future users, many of whom would be uninvolved in its generation.

A £5 million research project, KIM, was tasked with investigating this topic. A number of key conclusions were drawn from the complementary but eclectic work conducted during the project, each of which emerging from different domains and different aspects of the design process.

In order to provide a single, coherent set of recommendations for users and developers of design representation tools, a set of coherent principles have been established by synthesis of these conclusions. This chapter of aims to convey these principles and to make clear their provenance.