An Architecture for a Knowledge Augmented Integral View across Multiple Information Resources

Knowledge that is needed during the design of a product is scattered among various systems containing diverse types of information. To integrate those information resources with the benefit of contextual augmentation and aggregation, meta-concepts are introduced that span across multiple information systems. A guiding instance is used to govern and validate the interactions between the information systems, which leads to virtualized information in a distributed environment. The necessary coverage of various implications for the content leads to a centralized module that controls the knowledge management across the distributed resources. Aspects as search and maintenance and the problem of outdated, contradicting and wrong information is addressed, while keeping the sovereignty of the individual systems intact. The presented approach relies on today's high performance computing environments that allows the alignment and strong comparison of multi parallel information resources.