An approach to inter-enterprise engineering collaboration: Based on knowledge sharing agreements

This thesis describes an approach where engineering collaboration is built upon a network of on-line services that represent functional capabilities. At the core of the approach is the use of a shared representation of knowledge (language and vocabulary) to facilitate communication among different services. The thesis advances the opinion that collaborators need the ability to establish and customize knowledge sharing agreements (i.e. mutually agreed upon terminology and definitions) that are usable by people and their machines. The thesis describes a formal approach to representing engineering knowledge, examines its role in a computational framework that integrates a heterogeneous mix of software tools, and explores pragmatic aspects of constructing on-line engineering services.