Language resources and tools for supporting the system engineering process

This paper discusses an approach to tracking decisions made in meetings from documentation such as minutes and storing them in such a way as to support efficient retrieval. Decisions are intended to inform future actions and activities but over time the decisions and their rationale are often forgotten. Our studies have found that decisions, their rationale and the relationships between decisions are frequently not recorded or often buried deeply in text. Consequently, subsequent decisions are delayed or misinformed. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the preservation of group knowledge invested in the development of systems and a corresponding increase in the technologies used for capturing the information. This results in huge information repositories. However, the existing support for processing the vast amount of information is insufficient. We seek to uncover and track decisions in order to make them readily available for future use, thus reducing rework.