WikiLink: an encyclopedia-based semantic network for design innovation

TL;DR

WikiLink is a semantic network built on Wikipedia that combines statistical and semantic relationships to enhance design innovation and idea generation, demonstrating high coverage and practical usefulness.

Contribution

The paper introduces WikiLink, a novel semantic network that fuses statistical and semantic weights from Wikipedia to improve design innovation processes.

Findings

High coverage of terms, relationships, and disciplines.

Effective in inspiring new ideas for conceptual design.

Open-source implementation available.

Abstract

Data-driven design and innovation is a process to reuse and provide valuable and useful information. However, existing semantic networks for design innovation is built on data source restricted to technological and scientific information. Besides, existing studies build the edges of a semantic network only on either statistical or semantic relationships, which is less likely to make full use of the benefits from both types of relationships and discover implicit knowledge for design innovation. Therefore, we constructed WikiLink, a semantic network based on Wikipedia. Combined weight which fuses both the statistic and semantic weights between concepts is introduced in WikiLink, and four algorithms are developed for inspiring new ideas. Evaluation experiments are undertaken and results show that the network is characterised by high coverage of terms, relationships and disciplines, which proves the network's effectiveness and usefulness. Then a demonstration and case study results indicate that WikiLink can serve as an idea generation tool for innovation in conceptual design. The source code of WikiLink and the backend data are provided open-source for more users to explore and build on.