Kei Kurakawa

Life cycle design support based on environmental information sharing

The Green Browser is a design support tool, intended to cover the whole life cycle of environmentally conscious products. It supports designers to collaborate based on information sharing of the product over the Internet. It facilitates communication with consumers and specialists in order to receive feedback for the continuous design. The shared model of the Green Browser consists of three parts, i.e., strategy model, process model, and object model, which are linked to one another. The strategy model represents the concept of a product, in which requirements for the product are represented in a trade-off network. The process model represents the life cycle of a product. The object model represents geometry, function, and structure. These models are built and linked by designers by the support of the Green Browser. Some part of them is also accessible over the Internet from customers and specialists. The Green Browser is being implemented in Java and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). Java enables the Green Browser to be platform independent and executable on any major web browser. CORBA provides the Java-based Green Browser with access to the product database on a different architecture across the network. Through the Green Browser, the user can find information about the relationship between the requirements in the strategy model and product data in the object models. Several kinds of user interfaces are implemented to represent the strategy model in different perspectives. The concept and the implementation of the Green Browser are reported in this paper.

Analysis of key success factors for eco-business through case studies in Japan

In order to solve environmental issues, transition form conventional business to environmentally conscious business (Eco-business) is eagerly required. In order to promote Eco-business, it will be effective to support finding out Eco-business ideas. To do so, this paper takes an approach that provides business designer with general rules and prerequisites extracted from existing Eco-businesses. This paper collects 130 examples of Eco-businesses in Japan, investigates and classifies them to develop general guidelines and checklists for success of them. As a result, four customer’s values provided by Eco-businesses, eight rules that relates an environmental benefits of the society to the customer’s value, and eight rules for reducing business costs are derived. A tool for planning for new eco-business is also proposed.

Researcher Name Resolver: identifier management system for Japanese researchers

We built a researcher identifier management system called the Researcher Name Resolver (RNR) to assist with the name disambiguation of authors in digital libraries on the Web. RNR, which is designed to cover all researchers in Japan, is a Web-oriented service that can be openly connected with external scholastic systems. We expect it to be widely used for enriched scholarly communications. In this paper, we first outline the conceptual framework of RNR, which is jointly focused on researcher identifier management and Web resource linking. We based our researcher identifier scheme on the reuse of multiple sets of existing researcher identifiers belonging to the Japanese grant database KAKEN and the researcher directory ReaD & Researchmap. Researcher identifiers are associated by direct links to related resources on the Web through a combination of methods, including descriptive mapping, focused crawling on campus directories and researcher identification by matching names and affiliations. Second, we discuss our implementation of RNR based on this framework. Researcher identifiers construct uniform resource identifiers to show Web pages that describe researcher profiles and provide links to related external resources. We have adapted Web-friendly technologies—e.g., OpenSearch and the RDFs of Linked Data technology—in this implementation to provide Web-friendly services. Third, we discuss our application of RNR to a name disambiguation task for the search portal of the Japanese Institutional Repositories Online to determine how well the researcher identifier management system cooperates with external systems. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from the entire project as well as the future development directions we intend to take.

The Green Browser: An Internet-based information sharing tool for product life cycle design

The process of environmentally conscious design should involve collaboration among designers and specialists of multiple domains. We are trying to use the Internet to support designers and specialists collaborate in considering the tradeoff relationships among requirements for a product over the life-cycle.

Feature modeling from holistic viewpoints in product line engineering

In the field of software intensive systems, the software industry inherently requires a new method to obtain a high level of productivity by reuse of software embedded in the systems. Product line engineering is an emerging software engineering discipline with the new approach that makes it efficient to reuse embedded software by scoping a domain of systems. Features are described with terms for system requirements, which cover both functional requirements and nonfunctional requirements. Features are deployed in a tree figure, such that a general feature consists of subordinate features. The feature tree has a central role in system design and development. To construct a feature tree, the construction must be based on all fundamental design knowledge about a domain of systems such as of integrated circuits and mechanical devices as well as software entities because all design knowledge in any engineering disciplines in a domain of systems affect commonality and variability modeling in the feature tree. The feature modeling therefore needs a global systems engineering viewpoint.

Combining topic model and co-author network for KAKEN and DBLP linking

The Web of Data is based on two simple ideas: to employ the RDF data model to public structured data on the Web and to set explicit RDF links to interlink data items within different data sources. In this paper, we describe our experience in building a system of link discovery between KAKEN, a database provides the latest information of research projects in Japan, and the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography. Using these links one can navigate from the information of a computer scientist in KAKEN to his publications in the DBLP database. Our problem of linkage between KAKE researchers and DBLP authors is name disambiguation. We proposed combining LDA based topic model and co-author network approach to improve linkage accuracy.

An Automatic Extraction of Academia-Industry Collaborative Research and Development Documents on the Web

This research focuses on an automatic extraction method of Japanese documents describing University-Industry (U-I) relations from the Web. The method proposed here consists of a preprocessing step for Japanese texts and a classification step with a SVM. The feature selection process is especially tuned up for U-I relations documents. A U-I document extraction experiment has been conducted and the features found to be relevant for this task are discussed.

A SVM Applied Text Categorization of Academia-Industry Collaborative Research and Development Documents on the Web

A method of automatically extracting Japanese documents describing University-Industry (U-I) relations from the Web is proposed. The proposed method consists of Japanese text processing and support vector machine (SVM) classification. The SVM feature selections were customized for U-I relations documents. The strongest experimental result was 79.95 of accuracy and 81.17 of f-measure.

Effects of a Scenario-Based Design Information Model on Design Activities

One of the challenging issues that designers face during a conceptual design meeting is to maintain a variety of complex information. To tackle this issue, preliminary studies on design rationale have been conducted. The research approach in those studies is to construct a design information model and then implement a computer system based on the model. In this study, we pay attention to the importance of scenarios generated by designers during design meetings, and propose a scenario-based design information model that consists of three representations: the design solution refinement process representation, the design solution-centered structure representation, and the product scenario representation. We have implemented an experimental system for representing design ideas according to the scenario-based design information model, and conducted a design experiment to analyze how designers represent their ideas according the model and benefit from the represented ideas on the system.Copyright

Study on Requirement-Centered Design Support for Environmentally Conscious Products. (2nd Report). Implementation of the Environmentally Conscious Product Design Support System.

Environmentally conscious design support systems need to help multiple designers to clarify variety and complicated requirements over the product life cycle in early design stages. To build such an environmentally conscious design support framework, requirement-centered design information structure and requirement clarification process which is called the ReqC (RequirementCentered) model was proposed in the preliminary report. In this paper, the GLC (Green Life-Cycle) model based on the ReqC model has been developed for supporting multiple designers to understand their design discussion in which product requirements are considered over the product life cycle. The Green Browser system is implemented in Java and CORBA based on these models. The system has been applied to an actual design session during environmentally conscious design. An Interview to designers proved the system to be useful for them.