FORFLOW

The projects in this field explore the problems concerning the purposeful supply of the designers with data and information in the process of product development. In doing so the underlying process of development will be re- garded at filing and indexation as well as at the formulation and represen- tation of the information requirements. Basically the aspects of meta-data- oriented and of index-based retrieval should be considered here as complementary. The matter thereby is the utilisation in the process of product development of the available data and documents in the project, in the company and beyond. For this it is necessary to respect the special character of the documents and their inherent structure, their context and their origin as well as the context of the supported product developer.