Capturing decisions and rationale from collaborative design

Design is, at its heart, a decision-making process. The decisions, alternative ap-proaches considered, and the reasons behind the final choices are known as the Design Rationale (DR). The DR is usually not explicitly captured, at least not in an easily retrievable form. One way to reduce the effort in capturing rationale is to obtain the DR from unstructured documents and import it into a Rationale Man-agement System (RMS) that supports incremental formalization. In this paper, we describe how this capability has been added to the ORCA system and how it is used to import rationale from existing design information sources