How are we Involved?

K-Now work closely with large aerospace manaufacturers to provide improved knowledge management systems which cross organisational boundaries to improve knowledge reuse and sharing.

K-Now work in this sector includes commercial work and involvement in parts of two TSB funded projects (total TSB project values £180M).

The domain

Aerospace manufacturing, design and service is a highly complex task with unique challenges and concerns. Modern aerospace engines now consist of several hundred thousands of component parts and they can remain in working operation for many decades whilst being redeployed in a variety of places and operating conditions.

In order to improve the aerospace business designers try to improve on previous designs. Manufacturing of component parts becomes ever more sophisticated and complex, and service of engines is undertaken on planned schedules. In order to best optimise efforts to ensure safety, security, effectiveness and profitability across operations the company needs to analyse complex interlinked information from across the organisation sharing the information only when needed.

Typical problems

Problems in the aerospace domain are similar to other complex domains in that knowledge is spread across (and beyond) wide organisational boundaries and where recorded it is encoded with specialised language, custom formats and typically heterogeneous to other parts of the organisation.

Potential users of this valuable knowledge are faced with an unsifted mass of information (information overload) but no means to effectively search or explore the underlying knowledge in order to successfully operate and improve productivity.

How we help

Our technology is able to capture knowledge either at the point of its generation direct from users or alternatively extract semantic meaning from legacy documents, regardless of data source, format or terminology.

Our approach leverages semantic technologies meaning all of the knowledge obtained from within such documentation can be reused, searched and analysed across the entire organisation.

K-Now has extensive experience in this field and our technology has been deployed within multinational aerospace companies.