The exponential growth of the Internet and increasing communication
and computational power have created many opportunities for advancing
engineering, manufacturing, and business activities. Among them are
electronic catalogs. These have become basic information resources to a
number of people, ranging from shoppers looking for personal items to
engineers selecting electromechanical parts to build a product.
Although rich in content, current catalog systems are limited both in
search quality and in realizing the full potential of the retrieved
information. The active catalog system brings a conceptually new idea
to electronic commerce by providing a new, computationally usable,
catalog information environment about components and their use in
applications. It utilizes a rich body of domain knowledge to facilitate
access and retrieval of component information. The utility of retrieved
information is enhanced by using it to rapidly construct simulation
programs and test alternatives, supporting a “try before you
buy” paradigm in which users evaluate candidate components within
simulations of their design. We describe services provided in the
active catalog system to support engineers in selecting and evaluating
electromechanical components and subsystems. The services include
mechanisms for creating queries for parts based on their intended use
rather than merely parametric specifications, refining those queries to
take account of constraints imposed by domain knowledge, providing
multimodal information to help engineers assess and compare candidate
parts, and generating simulation models for candidate parts and
integrating them to provide simulation models for candidate systems.
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