Preservation-awareness in collaborative engineering

•We introduce the notion of preservation-aware applications, applied to a collaborative engineering process.•A base ontology for modeling organizations based on a social graph mataphor.•The approach is illustrated by implementing a collaborative tool.•The knowledge captured is integrated into a preservation process, and indexed in an archive.

In design and engineering, it is important to preserve more than the actual documents making up the product data. For knowledge-intensive industries it is of critical importance to also preserve the soft knowledge of the overall process within the product life cycle. The idea is not only to preserve the designs for the future, but also the knowledge about processes, decision making, and people. In order to preserve this knowledge, it is necessary to captured it at content creation time, a process currently mostly independent from the preservation process. This paper discusses how to make applications in content creation (e.g., in design and engineering) preservation-aware by using the OpenConjurer approach and framework.