Knowledge management reduces waste for the coatings industry
The coatings industry encompasses everything from corrosion resistant paints, through sealants to glass or wood coverings, and it has diverse applications in the automotive, aerospace and food packaging industries. The partners in the KnowCoat project, set out to reduce waste in the sector - estimated at EUR 400 million per year - by increasing transparency and improving decision-making. Knowledge management usually refers to collecting, organising, analysing and distributing the unstructured information held by organisations and the individuals who work in them. The KnowCoat platform uses expert system software to provide knowledge management applications for users in the coatings industry value chain. The platform includes support for various programming languages and development tools in its web-services based architecture. The system also includes a software development kit, as well as solutions and applications that have already been developed using the platform. The knowledge management functions supported include intelligent sourcing of information from software agents, or ‘spiders’, that surf file servers or the internet. A semi-automatic tool converts the information collected by the spiders into a standard XML format. An XML database can then store the documents. It can also be integrated with an indexing database that stores unstructured documents collected by the spiders and classified by pattern-matching software. Artificial intelligence and expert system software are also used to store expert knowledge and structure business problems and solutions, using case-based reasoning and neural networks. The industry standards supported by the platform include the web-service definition language (WSDL) and the CoatML vocabulary for describing coating products, materials, suppliers and manufacturers in XML language. As such the technology presents itself as the first service-on-demand knowledge management system for the coatings industry. It should provide users with a flexible tool that allows complex projects to be successfully completed at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
