By Stephen J. Baum and Ted L. Individuals across the shipbuilding enterprise depend on Web access and availability of digital ship data to perform their daily duties. As increasingly larger quantities of ship data become available digitally, the end user often finds it difficult to locate the required data for several reasons. First, it is difficult for the causal user to quickly and easily navigate through volumes of data to find what is of importance. Simple keyword searches based on textual queries are often frustrating and are regularly unsuccessful due to the lack of data standardization. Second, data tends to be distributed across…
