Product documentation management through REST-based web service

Abstract

Innovation is a creative process strongly associated with development and deployment of new products. This is essential in the global economy of today for the success and sustainability of companies. Collaboration between those involved in new product development (NPD) is an important requisite for product development and innovation. New product development involves not only the company and customers but also suppliers, free lancers and other stakeholders. Strong collaboration and agile communication among all are critical requirements for product development success. This is due to the highly competitive world economy we live in nowadays and also because data and relevant information that needs to be shared is distributed over networks of resources and users. Hence, web-based applications, decentralized repositories and databases are used to store and manage product and process development information as well as NPD stakeholders’ interaction. Thus, for meeting today’s new product development requirements Internet based collaborative tools and services must be applied. Web services are important assets in product development, helping the integration of data and knowledge bases and also for process and application interactions. This paper reports on a web services based research work focused on the development of a document-oriented web-based application for product development using Apache CouchDB technology and REST web services. The application seeks the managing of product and process information, as well as documentation generation, throughout the product development process cycle in an Internet based collaborative environment. An additional important function addressed deals with product development history.