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5 Conclusions
This article has presented a usable and portable implementation of Mediator1, a Mediator system for the representation
of knowledge and the computer support of diverse manufacturing endeavors. The World Wide Web has been used as a
knowledge transport mechanism, and the Netscape browser application has been used as a file and data serving agent on
the Web. A new application has been created and implemented to provide a visual language interface to Mediator1,
called XConMap. XConMap is a recursive, network aware object oriented concept mapping environment built with an
eye towards future enhancement, development, and long term cross platform compatibility. This article has shown
Mediator1 in use with data sets coordinating inspection process planning, manufacturing process planning, and a
complete product manufacturing life cycle.
The existing World Wide Web technologies already provide a major research for the supported of distributed concurrent
manufacturing. Further developments are required to fully implement the Mediator design. On major issue is that of
awareness in a distributed community--when someone in Canada comes to work in the morning how to they know what
their colleagues in Japan and Finland have done overnight without exhaustive search and without requiring those
colleagues to take special action to inform. CHRONO (Chen and Gaines, 1996) is a chronological awareness tool that is
being developed as a component of Mediator to allow members of a community to maintain awareness of relevant
activities.
XConMap and our other concept mapping tools on other platforms have compatible file structures but operate as client
helpers. WebMap (Gaines and Shaw, 1995b) is a tool for delivering the concept maps as clickable GIFs to users that do
not have a concept mapping client helper. A universal concept mapping tool is under development in Java that will
enable concept maps to be used and edited by those with any browser that supports Java. This will provide a visual
language interface to Mediator that can be used in a wide variety of applications.
The original implementation of Mediator supported synchronous editing at multiple sites. Group brainstorming and
discussion is desirable at various stages of the manufacturing life cycle and it will be important to extend web
technology to support synchronous interaction including voice communication. A version of Mediator is being
developed based on an integration of GroupKit (Roseman and Greenberg, 1992) with World Wide Web that will
support synchronous collaboration.
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by Industry, Science and Technology, Canada, as part of the international IMS research program,
and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We are grateful to many colleagues in IMS
for their contributions to the Mediator project, in particular, Aldo Dagnino, Peihua Gu, Martti Mäntylä, Tetsuo
Tomiyama and Moriki Toyama.
References
Chen, L.L.-J. and Gaines, B.R. (1996). Methodological issues in studying and supporting awareness on the World Wide
Web. Maurer, H., Ed. Proceedings of WebNet96. This conference. Charlottesville, VA, Association for the
Advancement of Computing in Education.
Gaines, B.R. and Norrie, D.H. (1994). Mediator: information and knowledge management for the virtual factory.
SIGMAN AAAI-94 Workshop: Reasoning about the Shop Floor. pp.30-39. Menlo Park, California, AAAI.
Gaines, B.R. and Norrie, D.H. (1995). Knowledge systematization in the international IMS research program.
Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. pp.958-963. New York,
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Gaines, B.R., Norrie, D.H. and Lapsley, A.Z. (1995). Mediator: an Intelligent Information System Supporting the
Virtual Manufacturing Enterprise. Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and
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Gaines, B.R. and Shaw, M.L.G. (1995a). Concept maps as hypermedia components. International Journal
Human-Computer Studies 43(3) 323-361.