Toward a Knowledge Medium 
 for Collaborative Product Development

        Thomas R. Gruber, Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory
        Jay M. Tenenbaum, EIT, Incorporated 
        Jay C. Weber, EIT, Incorporated 

Information sharing and decision coordination are central problems for
large-scale product development.  This paper proposes a framework for
supporting a {\em knowledge medium} \cite{stefik86}: a computational
environment in which explicitly represented knowledge serves as a
communication medium among people and their programs.  The framework
is designed to support information sharing and coordinated
communication among members of a product development organization,
particularly for the tasks of design knowledge capture, dynamic
notification of design changes, and active management of design
dependencies.  The proposed technology consists of a shared knowledge
representation (language and vocabulary), protocols for foreign data
encapsulation and posting to the shared environment, and mechanisms
for content-directed routing of posted information to interested
parties via subscription and notification services.  A range
of possible applications can be explored in this framework, depending
on the degree of commitment to a shared representation by
participating tools.  A number of
research issues, fundamental to building such a knowledge medium, are
introduced in the paper.