Madefast: Collaborative Engineering over the Internet
Mark R. Cutkosky, Jay M. Tenenbaum,
P
and Jay Glicksman
olitical, economic, and technological forces are chang-
An exploration of collaborative capabilities
ing the landscape of engineering. As the world’s economies become more interconnected and more competitive, there is an increasing need for organiza-
when using the Web as a design tool.
tions to form joint design and manufacturing teams that collaborate for the life of a project and then disperse. For example, a new electromechanical product
may involve a mechanical design group in Boston working closely with a control systems subcontractor in California and an OEM partner in Singapore. Similar challenges face defense contractors who need to respond rapidly to new requirements. The ARPA Manufacturing Automation and Design Engineering (MADE) program has been developing Internet-based tools, services, protocols, and design methodologies that will allow contractors to compose teams of specialists from different locations and organizations as project needs arise. As a practical test of what the MADE program has achieved, members of the MADE community undertook an ambitious exercise in 78
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Figure 1. Madefast was a grass-roots effort involving industrial and academic participants from around the country. The online version of this figure is linked to the home page of each participating organization—see http://www.madefast.org/mf/Overview/participants.html
geographically distributed design and prototyping called Madefast. The exercise tested current MADE technology, identified future research directions and established a network of tools, services, documentation and contacts for the MADE community. Madefast is an early example of a new and rapidly growing genre of projects that use the World-Wide Web (WWW) extensively for collaborating and archiving results—see Figure 1. Accordingly, the WWW is the best primary resource for documenting the project. Our challenge in writing this article is to linearize the presentation of the information contained in the WWW for publication in print. Readers with access to the WWW are encouraged to read an online version of this material, using it as their guide, and taking frequent excursions. The online version can be found at http://www.madefast.org/mf/ ACM_paper.html. In the online version, references to documentation pages, tools, and services are hyperlinked. Project Overview
Madefast began as challenge issued at an ARPA program meeting in February 1994. Members of the ARPA MADE research community and program manager P. Khosla resolved to design and prototype a defense-related product in six months. It was agreed
that the product should require a mix of technologies and should take advantage of off-the-shelf components when possible. Producing a modified version of an optical tracker or seeker, such as those used in missiles and airborne surveillance, was suggested as a candidate product. Following the meeting, the project was launched with an electronic mail message broadcast to members of the MADE community outlining the proposed project and soliciting suggestions. Preliminary meetings and conversations by satellite videoconference, telephone, and electronic mail established the project organization, with Stanford University and Enterprise Integration Technologies taking responsibility for project and web coordination and the University of Utah taking primary responsibility for mechanical design and fabrication of the (as yet undefined) Madefast product. A project web was established during the first month of the project. The web included a chronology of meetings and milestones, a map of registered participants and top-level pages for the design process and the design artifact. Design specifications were released in an electronic mail message from ARPA on April 14, 1994. The requirement was to design a new prototype optical seeker, similar to those used in missiles and aircraft COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
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for tracking infrared targets. A seeker is a complex system that combines optical, electronic and mechanical hardware as well as control software. As such, it provides a good test of the ability of a diverse team of engineers to collaborate over a distance while using a variety of design and analysis tools. The Madefast seeker was given the non-lethal mission of tracking a dot of light from a hand-held laser pointer played against a wall. design effort began with contacts with defense contractors at Texas Instruments and Hughes, who provided declassified drawings and expertise as a starting point for the redesign effort. These designs became a starting point for the design web. Although the Madefast seeker was not intended for launching, it was decided that the result would be more credible to the target audience in the
T Figure 2. The mechanical design page for the Madefast seeker
Figure 3. A taxonomy of alternative optical systems considered
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defense industries if it came close to being launchable. This decision entailed making the design fit inside a five-inch diameter tube and led to adoption of the same, compact mechanism used in military seekers in which mirror-based optics are mounted within gimbals for rotation about horizontal and vertical axes. A cutaway diagram of the design can be seen in Figure 2. Preliminary designs and concepts were evaluated during the first few months of the project and subsystem fabrication and testing commenced over the summer of 1994. During this time, as the nature of the design became increasingly clear, other groups within the MADE community offered specific prototyping and analysis services for subsystems or components. A first prototype was built in September and demonstrated at an ARPA meeting in November, 1994. Subsequent work resulted in a second self-contained version of the device with onboard power and control electronics.
A Tour of the Madefast Web
The design of the documentation for Madefast was as challenging as the design of the seeker itself. The WWW was chosen to be the shared repository for all CAD models, notes, test results, calculations, and other information relating to the design. Because Madefast was a community effort, a “neutral” server was established for top-level project pages. These pages contain pointers to the webs maintained by participants at various sites; it is in the participants’ webs that the design resides. It was also decided that parallel (but interconnected) webs should be maintained for documenting the Madefast project administration, design process, and design artifact. It is possible to navigate the Madefast web following any of these threads, often visiting the same pages. Early attempts were also made to enforce a standard documentation style regarding the design, including decisions, tasks, rationale, etc. These attempts largely failed, for reasons that will be dis-
Figure 4. The Madefast vision, in which an engineer can use his or her own laptop computer as an engineering notebook for personal and shared design information and as a gateway to tools and services on the Internet
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cussed later in this article. Nonetheless, the level of demonstrations, and milestones. Again, this informadocumentation, while far short of the participants’ tion can be useful when revisiting a project for ambitions, is better than typically found in design redesign: Where could time have been saved? What efforts involving a one-of-a-kind prototype designed were the major sources of conflict? by a hastily assembled team. A good entry point for touring Madefast is the Pro- Design Tools and Services ject Overview page (http://www.madefast.org/mf/ Figure 4 captures the vision that lay behind the MadeOverview/overview.html), which describes what a fast project. The idea was that an engineer would seeker is and provides top-level pointers to the par- have access to a powerful computer workstation, ideticipants, project objectives, services and tools used, ally on a laptop computer, to use as his or her perand design process. For an overall view of the de- sonal electronic notebook for recording designs, sign, the best top-level page is the Current State of sketches, memos, meeting notes, etc. [21]. This workthe Design (http://www.madefast.org/mf/ station is also connected to the Internet, where it has Design-Documentation/current-state.html), which access to the shared Madefast project pages posted by contains pointers to information about the mechanical, optical, and electronics subMAKEFAST RESOURCES systems that are described in pages maintained by the variMADEFAST Participant Services and Tools ous participants. For example, Figure 2 shows the Alpha_1 The University of Utah's geometric modeling and manufacturing software. mechanical assemblies develhttp://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/alpha1/ oped and fabricated by participants from the University Design Sheet of Utah. A tool developed by the Rockwell International Palo Alto Laboratory for flexible premise behind the documentation was that it is just as important to capture the process leading to a design as the design itself. This is especially true for a distributed design exercise and for a project in which the team members have no history of prior collaboration and cannot readily foresee conflicts or bottlenecks in the design process. Consequently, a significant fraction of the Madefast web pages concern the design process and the rationale behind design choices. Figure 3, a diagram from the page summarizing the alternatives considered for the optical system, reveals that the final solution is just one of several considered. With a minor change in requirements (e.g., an enclosure of larger diameter or a change in the tracking specifications), one of these other optical systems might be preferred for a redesign. Other pages capture the chronology of meetings,
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analysis and trade-off studies in design. http://www.rpal.rockwell.com/index.html DME Device modeling, simulation, analysis, and documentation facility developed by Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab (KSL). http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/htw/htw-demos.html MD* and SLA Rapid prototyping services at Carnegie Mellon University for stereolithography and thermal spray deposition established as part of the ARPA ACORN project. http://acorn.eit.com/cmu/sdm/cmu_sdm.html MSU Composite Design Services Part of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISL) within the NSF Composites Center under the Advanced Computing Thrust (ACT) project at Michigan State University. http://isl.cps.msu.edu/act/ SimLab A simulation and analysis tool developed by the Cornell Computer Science Department. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Projects/SimLab/madefast/home/html Web Librarian EIT's implementation of Dedal, a model-based search utility for Web documents. http://www.eit.com:80/research/nasa.sbir/web_librarian.html
Collaboration Ware for Distributed Teams Mmphone EIT's collaboration software that makes the Mbone tools accessible via the Web. http://www.eit.com/software/mmphone/phoneform.html Shared Mosaic EIT's modification of XMosaic that allows a group to share the same pages in a Web browser during a collaboration session. http://www.eit.com/goodies/software/share_mosaic/ WWWeasel EIT's environment for authoring HTML Web documents that supports capture and manipulation of multimedia, links, and application snapshots. http://www.eit.com:80/goodies/software/wwweasel/
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all participants, as well as tools and services. The online version of this figure (http://www.made fast.org/Demo/ Slides/ISAT_demo.html) is worth visiting because the various icons of tools and services are examples from the Madefast community and will take you to the appropriate sites if you click on them. of engineering analysis tools and services provided by Madefast participants and their associated URLs are listed in the threepart sidebar “Madefast Resources.” For example, the preliminary optics analysis was performed with the aid of Rockwell’s Design Sheet and final dynamics analysis was performed using SimLab from Cornell University. The seeker system was modeled using DME from the StanXAMPLES
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enhance the richness and completeness of the online documentation even if they did not expedite the design process. Collaboration and Authoring Tools
Participants also used several experimental tools to facilitate their interactions with the Madefast web and with each other. A multimedia authoring environment helped them create and manage hyperlinked engineering documents. A suite of collaboration tools enabled them to share documents and ideas, both asynchronously via email, and synchronously in real time. These tools were integrated with the WWW so that downloading and launching them often involved nothing more than pointing and clicking. The goal was to transform the WWW into a collaboration medium for interdisciplinary engineering teams.
Other Resources in the ARPA MADE Community
Authoring
The Agile Cable Production Service (ACaPS) An experimental service for cable harness design and production at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, Sunnyvale, CA. http://hitchhiker.space.lockheed.com/;acaps/service/acaps_cca.html
The WWWeasel [11] is EIT’s environment for authoring HTML WWW documents. It supports structured editing, multimedia capture and conversion, and hypertext link browsing, all integrated via a drag-and-drop user interface. WWWeasel was specifically designed for creating distributed WWW documents, containing links to content that is not part of the authors’ environment or under their control. Such distributed documents are an ideal way to structure shared engineering notebooks that may include designs, test data, simulations, and application snapshots from other team members as well as material provided by commercial vendors and subcontractors.
ARPA Knowledge Sharing Library Knowledge sharing protocols, engineering ontologies, software, and related papers maintained by Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab. http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ DesignNet A useful catalog of components, services, and documentation for engineering design projects. http://cdr.stanford.edu/html/SHARE/DesignNet.html MADE Resources Resources from all MADE participants. http://www.eit.com/arpa/arpa-resources.html ModelWorld Part of a virtual manufacturing facility being developed at the Texas A&M University Computer Aided Manufacturing Lab. http://tamcam.tamu.edu/modelw;1/modelw.htm PartNet An experimental online vendor catalog system at the University of Utah. http://part.net/ RapidCIM Rapid Prototyping and Development of FMS Control Software for Computer Integrated Manufacturing, from the Texas A&M University Computer Aided Manufacturing Lab. http://tamcam.tamu.edu/rapidcim.html
Document Control
ford Knowledge Systems Laboratory, which provided a symbolic model of the seeker. The majority of the mechanical parts were designed and fabricated using the Alpha1 system from the University of Utah. A composite tube and a light shroud were fabricated using the rapid prototyping facilities at Michigan State University and Carnegie Mellon University, respectively. A concerted effort was made to exploit as many MADE tools and services as possible. Some of these resources are nearly commercial grade, while others are research prototypes. However, as discussed later in this article, many of the tools and services did
When documents are incorporated into larger works (e.g., engineering notebooks), additional publishing tools are needed to manage the relationships among them. Document Control System (DCS) from EIT runs on WWW servers and supports access and version control for WWW documents. Team members check in and check out documents they need to work on; when documents change, links to them from other documents are automatically updated to maintain consistency. Document Navigation
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sharing design information across the design team, and preserving it for downstream tasks such as maintenance and redesign. Such information is, of course, useless if it cannot be found. The standard approaches to locating information on WWW pages, such as hierarchical directories and keyword searches, do not provide adequate granularity and precision for engineering design applications. For this reason, EIT developed Web Librarian [10]. The Web Librarian (http://www.eit.com:80/ research/nasa.sbir/web_librarian.html) is a modelbased search utility for locating WWW documents. It is based on Dedal [2], a system developed at NASA Ames for structuring and retrieving large amounts of design information. Like Dedal, the Web Librarian uses qualitative device models and heuristics to infer connections between queries and documents. For example, questions pertaining to “design alternatives” regarding the “optical system” lead to a list of links to WWW pages (with the best matches at the top of the list) containing discussions of candidate optical systems. Relevant documents can thus be found based on relationships and semantics, not just words that have been indexed. Users make queries through a WWW forms-based interface and receive links to potentially relevant documents. While the Web Librarian requires more work up front to create the models and links than preparing a keyword index, that effort is repaid over the life cycle of a design and subsequent redesign efforts. Asynchronous Communication
of the most useful tools in Madefast was also the simplest. A program called HyperMail (http://www. eit.com:80/goodies/software/hypermail) allowed participants to have email messages automatically archived and posted on the WWW. The HyperMail utility provided a thread of issues and responses and made it easy to search the messages by subject, date, author, etc. In addition, each message body was parsed for references to URLs; these were transformed into hyperlinks. Participants soon found the HyperMail archives more convenient to search than their personal mailboxes. Two archives were set up, one for general project information and one for design information. StoryBoard is a simple graphical editing environment that lets designers compose MIME multimedia messages, including graphics, animations, videos, and data files. These messages can be emailed to other designers or posted to the WWW using HyperMail. StoryBoard provides two extensions to MIME that have proved valuable for engineering collaboration. The first is a transparent overlay that allows graphical and textual annotations to be made without disturbing the integrity of the original message. The second is a new MIME content-type called pointer motion gestures. This extension enables users to ask and respond to questions about a design using synchronized recording and playback of mouse motion gesNE
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tures accompanied by verbal annotation. For instance, an engineer can circle a dimension on a drawing while asking “Where did this value come from?” Synchronous Communication
Madefast featured an early implementation of SHAREd Web [13], a real-time collaboration environment built upon the WWW and the Internet’s IP Multicast Backbone (MBONE) protocols [7]. The SHAREd Web environment enables real-time sharing of WWW information using a Web browser, text-chat, audio, and video. In Madefast, a shared version of Mosaic [13] allowed any participant in an online meeting to click on a URL and all other participants would then see the same document. Shared audio, video, and whiteboard conferencing were provided through the public-domain MBONE tools (Vat, Nv, and Wb). However, the tools were used only for point-to-point communication over IP. Conference initiation and setup were handled non-intrusively using Mmphone. Mmphone is a MIME email-based rendezvous mechanism that is accessed through any WWW browser. A conference organizer completes an HTML form, checking off boxes corresponding to the collaboration capabilities required. The organizer also selects the desired participant from a pictorial index of Madefast personnel. A MIME message is then transmitted to the invitee, containing the information needed to enroll automatically in the conference. The Madefast demonstration relied on point-topoint conferencing and Unix workstations running X. A reimplementation of SHAREd Web supporting IP Multicast and interoperation across Unix, PC, and Macintosh platforms is under development. The architecture of the new system features a message bus on top of MBONE. This bus supports platform independence because the messages are application-specific, not platform-specific. An application programming interface (API) makes it easy to write wrappers that make applications collaboration-aware. The first application to be integrated is an MBONE version of Shared Mosaic that can accommodate hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous users. The architecture scales well because only one copy of a WWW page is retrieved from the WWW server, and that page is shared via Multicast. Related Work
The Madefast exercise took advantage of several technologies and combined them in interesting ways to carry out a complex design. In this section, we describe related work in these different areas. Distance collaboration using teleconferencing and shared media is an area of much research and development. Research prototypes include the Media Space project at Xerox PARC [3], the Cruiser [8] and Touring machine [1] projects at Bellcore, the Argo system at DEC [9], and the Ontario Telepresence Project [4]. These projects used proprietary systems
and some analog video. In Madefast, we chose to use the MBONE tools [7] because they are open and digital. This is expected to lead to systems that: • Support heterogeneous platforms • Scale well in wide-area networks • Enable capture of session information • Facilitate playback of asynchronous information Research in computer-supported cooperative work [6, 19] has also had an impact on Madefast. Work has been done on agents [17] and distributed artificial intelligence [15, 18, 24] that predates the notions of network services as explored in Madefast. Authoring to generate online engineer’s notebooks is an important source of design rationale. Design notebooks have been developed on top of visual emacs [14] and Framemaker [20, 22]. WWWeasel and workers on a General Electric project [16] are now using the WWW as the basis for engineers’ notebooks. This direction has immense potential since the WWW provides a powerful distribution mechanism.
advantages of WWW-based design documentation are: • Documentation is immediately accessible to all participants, whether working asychronously or while reviewing the information during a conference call. • The documentation is decentralized, allowing groups to maintain ownership and editorial control of their contributions. • The WWW allows users to search according to different interests (e.g., project administration, optical systems, controls). With the continued development of better searching tools, we expect this capability to become increasingly important.
Madefast differed from
a conventional industrial
The utility of the project web for redesign became clear in December 1994 when it was decided to do a second “desktop” version of the seeker. During telephone and teleconferencing discussions (and arguments) among the teams, it was useful to pull up the documentation at each site regarding controls systems and electronic circuits. In the few cases in which we could not immediately locate the information we needed, we had to suspend the conversation while hunting down the information and faxing it or sending it by electronic mail or ftp. Then we played telephone tag, and a day would pass before making a decision. Access to shared, comprehensive online documentation accelerates the process of reaching a consensus. For similar reasons, the project web was also useful for bringing new team members up to speed during the design and redesign projects. For example, it was useful to tell our control software consultants, “Here, go look at these web pages and send me a note when you’ve digested the material. Then we can talk.” Comments from these consultants were also valuable for reorganizing the project web to make it less confusing to newcomers.
project in that it was a community effort with no formal top-down
management structure and
retrieval is also an area of considerable interest. Many search engines exist for documents on the WWW (e.g., WAIS, Personal Library Software, Verity, and InfoSeek). Modelbased retrieval techniques [2, 5, 23] are also being explored in the information retrieval research field. Web Librarian applies model-based retrieval techniques to the WWW in a document-oriented manner that brings these capabilities to a WWW-based search engine. NFORMATION
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no central authority.
Discussion and Future Work
The Madefast exercise produced a working seeker prototype in record time. But the more important legacy of Madefast is the living project web that it has created. A project web such as the one created for Madefast is useful for redesign, for the design of related projects, for engineering education and for access to engineering tools, services, and information in the context of design examples. In the following paragraphs we expand on these ideas. Perhaps the single most important decision at the onset of the project was to make absolutely all documentation available on the WWW. Since each participating group is responsible for its own site, there is no central authority or distribution site. The main
second use of the project web is for learning about and revisiting tools and services used during a project. When revisiting an infrequently-used tool, engineers often prefer to go back to their notebooks to review how they used the tool on previous occasions, rather than diving straight into the generic documentation provided by the tool’s creators. It is likely that the tool was previously used in a context
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similar to the present one and the extra contextual information, as well as any applications tips that were recorded in the earlier case, help the engineers to get reacquainted. By the same token, the Madefast web provides a convenient way to learn about tools and services available online. Going a step further, we believe that a project web can provide a powerful combination of case study and access to analysis tools for engineering education. The extra context of a working design example should help students to understand how the tools work, what they are good for, when they fail, and why.
competent and should be consulted directly about the optical-sensing circuit. An interesting question is whether the sophistication of online virtual interaction environments (MOOs and MUDs, etc.) will evolve to the point that these essential human elements can be assimilated electronically. Advances in session creation and management are also needed, along with better procedures for capturing and reusing session information. To be used regularly, online teleconferencing tools must become as convenient as their competition: telephones, faxes, and email.
Organization Problems and Issues
The Service Paradigm
Madefast differed from a conventional industrial project in that it was a community effort with no formal top-down management structure and no central authority. Extensive discussion was needed to determine which groups would take responsibility for which subsystems and aspects of the design. The Madefast pages rapidly became a large and complex set of interconnected project webs. The online documentation contains a mix of formal information (including geometric models, circuit diagrams, analyses and test results) and informal information in the form of email messages, sketches, photographs, and video clips. The pages went through at least three overhauls, and yet it is still easy for newcomers to get lost. The difficulty of organizing an evolving project hyperweb points to the need for tools to help us automate web organization and navigation as a by-product of a well-managed distributed design project. Existing tools for serving WWW pages treat the pages and their components as files. What is needed are tools that treat pages as documents with embedded media and that permit structuring of pages into units that can be manipulated as a group. Then, for example, pages could be reorganized from a chronological organization to one based on the structural components of the device being designed, and all internal links would be automatically rewritten to match the new organization.
When powerful design and analysis tools are made available as services on the Internet, providing human expertise with those tools can be an essential ingredient. For example, the Alpha1 program is most powerful in the hands of the group that developed it at the University of Utah. This point was reinforced when the time came for a mold to be fabricated for the composite seeker casing. The composite part was to be manufactured at the Michigan State University (MSU) composites center. It soon became clear that the easiest way to manufacture the mold was to have it machined at the University of Utah, where the manufacturing library associated with Alpha1 could be used to generate CNC milling programs directly from a solid model. However, rather than converting the MSU CAD design into an IGES file and shipping it to Utah for conversion into an Alpha1 model it was actually faster to have MSU send a fax of the mold to Utah and have the group at Utah build the mold from scratch in Alpha1—considering the desire to generate a CNC program from the outset. Other tools in the MADE community are equally sophisticated and demanding of experienced users. In many cases these tools were not representative of commercial-grade software but were valuable services when combined with the expertise of the groups that knew them best. An interesting side issue is that the research programs were typically more open, and made more information-explicit, than is the norm for commercial software. For example, the DME systems modeler from the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory maintains explicit representations of constraints associated with every component. The resulting model provides richer documentation than a model in a commercial dynamic systems analysis program would typically provide. Several advances are necessary before online services can compete with current practice. First, there is the issue of security. Companies will not send confidential information (design data, project information, or billing information) over the Internet to a service provider if they think it can be intercepted. Second, standards are important so that companies can use their in-house tools with any service provider. EDI standards for commerce are reaching a suitable state of maturity but are not yet well-supported on the
Human Interaction
point that will come as no surprise to those readers whose companies have started to experiment with teleconferencing is that, despite the commitment of the Madefast participants to exploiting the Internet for collaboration, a considerable amount of travel and face-to-face contact was needed to get the ball rolling. The main reason is that it was essential for team members to assimilate the local culture as well as the organizational structure of other teams to cooperate effectively. One does not easily learn, for example, that a particular technician at another site is shy (and does not speak up during group videoconferences or respond to broadcast solicitations for feedback by electronic mail) but very
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Internet. Product standards, especially for advanced tools such as were used in Madefast, are still not sophisticated enough to handle all the data needed. Finally, interaction between users and services needs to be improved. The initial services being offered can be run as batch jobs with all the information provided before processing. Many interesting services, however, require interaction during the processing phase and user-friendly interfaces are needed so that they can be used effectively. The Madefast exercise validates the Internet as an information infrastructure for collaborative engineering. Although the results are encouraging, much work remains to be done to make such an infrastructure commercially viable. For example, small- and medium-sized providers of engineering and manufacturing services will need inexpensive starter kits to make their services accessible over the Internet. Designers will need directory services to help them locate these services and certification services to establish their qualifications. Research is needed to create the tools that will help organize online engineering information both for individuals and groups. ARPA’s MADE program sponsors the development of such software and services. C Acknowledgments The Madefast project was supported by ARPA under the MADE program. Special thanks are due to G. Toye, L. Leifer, and J. Wagner at Stanford and C. Valiquette and S. Drake at Utah for the extensive time and effort they put into Madefast. Many other individuals at the participant sites contributed significantly to the Madefast project and, while space does not permit us to list them all here, we are sure that their contributions will become apparent as readers explore the Madefast web. References 1. Arango, M., et al. The Touring machine system. Commun. ACM 36, 1 (Jan. 1993), 68–77. 2. Baudin, C., Gevins, J., Baya, V., and Mabogunje, A., Dedal: Using Domain Concepts to Index Engineering Design Information. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, August, 1992. 3. Bly, S., Harrison, S., and Irwin, S. Media Spaces: Bringing people together in a video, audio, and computing environment. Commun. ACM 36, 1 (Jan. 1993), 28–47. 4. Buxton, W. Telepresence: Integrating shared task and person spaces. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface ‘92 (Vancouver, B.C., May 1992). 5. Celentano, A., Fugini, M.G., Pozzi, S. Knowledge-based document retrieval in office environments: The Kabiria system. ACM Trans. Info. Syst. 13, 3 (July 1995), 237–268. 6. Ellis, C.A., Gibbs, S.J., and Rein, G.L. Groupware: Some issues and experiences. Commun. ACM 34, 1 (Jan. 1991), 38–58. 7. Eriksson, H. MBONE: The multicast backbone. Commun. ACM 37, 8 (Aug. 1994), 54–60. 8. Fish, R.S., Kraut, R.E., Root, R.W., and Rice, R.E. Video as a technology for information communication. Commun. ACM 36, 1 (Jan. 1993), 48–61. 9. Gajewska, H., Kistler, J., Manasse, M.S., and Redell, D.D. Argo: A system for distributed collaboration. In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia ‘94, (San Francisco, Oct. 1994), pp. 433–440. 10. Glicksman, J. and Hart, C. A Web librarian for structuring and retrieval of information. In Proceedings of the 2d Electronic Docu-
mentation Workshop, Palo Alto, CA, May 1995, pp. 16–17. 11. Glicksman, J., Kramer, G.A., and Mayer, N.P. Internet publishing via the World-Wide Web. In Proceedings of Groupware ‘94 (San Jose, Calif., Aug. 1994), pp. 431–442. 12. Karam, G.M., McLeod, B., and Boersma, G. A Network Services Interface for Telepresence Applications. In Proceedings of the IEEE Interational Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems, April 1995. 13. Kumar, V., Glicksman, J., and Kramer, G.A., A SHAREd web to support design teams. In Proceedings of the 3d Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (Morgantown, West Virginia, Apr. 1994), pp. 178–182. 14. Lakin, F., Wambaugh, J., Leifer, L., Cannon, D., Sivard, C. The electronic design notebook: Performing medium and processing medium. Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics 5, 4 (Apr. 1989), pp. 214–226. 15. Larner, D.L. Factories, objects, and blackboards. AI Expert 5, 4 (Apr. 1990), 38–45. 16. Lewis, J.W., Bernstein, B.M., Kenny, K.B. et al. The concurrent engineering toolkit: A network agent for manufacturing cycle time reduction. In Proceedings of CE ‘94: Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications (Pittsburgh, PA, August 1994). 17. Malone, T.W., Lai, K-Y., Fry, C. Experiments with Oval: A ‘radically tailorable’ tool for cooperative work. ACM Trans. Info. Syst. 13, 2 (Apr. 1995), 177–205. 18. Pan, J.Y-C., Tenenbaum, J.M., Glicksman, J. A framework for knowledge-based computer-integrated manufacturing. IEEE Trans. Semiconductor Manufacturing, SM-2, 2 (May 1989), pp. 33–46. 19. Schmidt, K. and Bannon, L. Taking CSCW seriously: Supporting articulation work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 1, 1–2 (1992), 7–40. 20. Silva, M.J. and Katz, R.H. Active documentation: A new interface for VLSI design. In Proceedings of the 30th Design Automation Conference (Dallas TX, June 1993), pp. 654–660. 21. Toye, G., Cutkosky, M.R., Leifer, L.J. et al. SHARE: A methodology and environment for collaborative product development. The Int. J. of Intelligent and Cooperative Info. Syst. 3, 2 (June 1994), 129–53. 22. Uejio, W.H. Electronic design notebook for the DARPA initiative in concurrent engineering. CE Enabling Technology: Selected Technical Papers. CERN, West Virginia University, April 1991. 23. Weaver, M.T., France, R.K., Chen, Q., et al. Using a framebased language for information retrieval. Int. J. of Intelligent Syst. 4, (1989), 223–257. 24. Williams, L.J. and Lochovsky, F.H. Supporting knowledge migration in organizations. Info. Processing 89, G.X. Ritter, Ed., (August/September 1989), 259–264. MARK R. CUTKOSKY is Associate Chair for Design and Manufacturing in the Mechanical Engineering Department and a co-director of the Stanford Integrated Manufacturing Association at Stanford University; email:
[email protected] JAY M. TENENBAUM is a founder and CEO of Enterprise Integration Technologies Corporation (EIT), a subsidiary of VeriFone, which specializes in information technology for electronic commerce, collaborative engineering, and agile manufacturing; email:
[email protected] JAY GLICKSMAN is a cofounder and principal scientist at Enterprise Integration Technologies. He is the leader of two projects designing concurrent engineering tools for designers, and is also responsible for the development of WWW technology in the areas of model-based search and document management; email:
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