The engineering design process follows a series of standardized stages ofdevelopment, which have many aspects in common with software engineering. Amongthese stages, the principle solution can be regarded as an analogue of thedesign specification, fixing as it does the way the final product works. It isusually constructed as an abstract sketch (hand-drawn or constructed with a CADsystem) where the functional parts of the product are identified, and geometricand topological constraints are formulated. Here, we outline a semanticapproach where the principle solution is annotated with ontological assertions,thus making the intended requirements explicit and available for furthermachine processing; this includes the automated detection of design errors inthe final CAD model, making additional use of a background ontology ofengineering knowledge. We embed this approach into a document-oriented designworkflow, in which the background ontology and semantic annotations in thedocuments are exploited to trace parts and requirements through the designprocess and across different applications.
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