Abstract
Baudin, Catherine; Underwood, Jody G.; Baya, Vinod; "Using Device
Models to Facilitate the Retrieval of Multimedia Design Information,
In proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence, Chambery, France, pp 1237-1243, August
29-September 2,1993.
An engineering team generated information in the form of meeting
summaries, progress reports, engineering notes, spreadsheet
calculations and CAD drawings. While complete "machine intelligible"
models of an artifact are still difficult to acquire, canned text
information or videotapes of meetings are easy to capture but
difficult to reuse. Dedal is an interface that facilitates the reuse
of design experience by providing an intelligent guide for retrieving
text, graphics and videotaped documents. It uses: (1) concepts from a
model of the designed artifact to index and query design documents,
and (2) a set of heuristics that reason from the model to "guess"
where the answers to a question may be documented when the retrieval
fails.
We observed an engineer asking questions to Dedal to access records of
a shock absorber design and found that (1) using a model to index the
records significantly increased the precision and recall of the
information retrieved when compared with a baseline retrieval system,
and (2) the heuristics contributed to this performance by increasing
the recall of Dedal by 40%.
Vinod Baya
baya@sunrise.stanford.edu