This paper describes work in progress to develop an information broker of engineering parts that enables the user to describe his/her goal in terms of the function to be achieved. The desired function is described in the form of "to do X" with any number of qualifying terms. The system assists the user in incremental refinement of search goals. It uses explicit ontologies of functional terms and a knowledge of typical functions in order to map from the given functional specification to actual products.
functional reasoning, function-based retrieval, ontology, functional
representation, information retrieval