THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERING WIKI: WIKID

Industrial design engineers use a wide variety of knowledge fields when making decisions in their de-sign process. Obviously, designers cannot master ev-ery field, so they are therefore often looking for a set of rules of thumb on a particular subject. For this need a knowledge database in wiki format has been developed through a chain of studies: WikID, a port-manteau of wiki and industrial design. WikID aims to be a design tool. It offers information in a compact manner tailored to its targeted user group: industrial design engineers. The paper describes the develop-ment of WikID in a chain of studies. For a knowledge database the main issue is the labour and time con-suming nature of collecting, selecting and structur-ing the contents for the database. For this issue, the focus is set on the use of wiki-software, and conse-quently on the importance of a user base, on the cre-ation of an import wizard and templates for reducing the effort required to maintaining the database, and on the options to use semantic properties in a wiki. These topics are studied in literature and by means of a questionnaire amongst 70 respondents. One of the findings is that the targeted user group is willing to use a wiki based database. Other results of this study are an import wizard and a specified content for a materials properties template. After these studies the time had come to put WikID online: www.WikID.eu