Design rationale is an important category of design knowledge. Effective reuse of design rationale depends on its successful retrieval. In this paper, an approach for design rationale retrieval using ontology-aided indexing is presented. First, a design rationale ontology is designed based on the extended IBIS-based design rationale representation in order to effectively utilize the semantics embedded in DR. Then, an ontology-aided indexing method is proposed to build indexes for design rationale records to index the semantic concepts and relationships in DR. Furthermore, three kinds of query modes are developed to support flexible querying, among which natural language input query and DR record based query have much more semantics and thus lead to better retrieval results. Finally, a prototype system is implemented. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Design rationale is an important category of design knowledge. Effective reuse of design rationale depends on its successful retrieval. In this paper, an approach to design rationale retrieval using ontology-aided indexing is presented. First, a design rationale ontology is designed based on the extended IBIS-based design rationale representation. Then, an ontology-aided indexing method is given to build indices for design rationale records. Furthermore, three kinds of query modes are developed to support flexible querying. Finally, a prototype system is implemented. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.