From handicraft prototypes to limited serial productions: Exploiting knowledge artifacts to support the industrial design of high quality products

This paper presents a conceptual and computational framework to support experts in the design and manufacturing of high quality products. The framework is based on the development of specific knowledge artifacts characterized by tools for the management of functional, procedural, and experiential knowledge. As a case study, the GUITAR HERO project is presented. The project aims at building a knowledge-based system to support experts of a handicraft enterprise involved in the design and manufacturing of electric guitars characterized by an aluminum body. The domain of the project is extremely innovative, because electric guitars are typically manufactured with different kinds of wood rather than metals or other materials. To this aim, an ontological representation of the electric guitar has been implemented exploiting NavEditOW, a computational framework for the codification, navigation, and querying of ontologies over the Internet, based on the OWL language. Copyright © 2010 Cambridge University Press.