Use case · Evidence-backed engineering Q&A
A question in plain language, answered from your own standards, specifications and project documents, with the governing clause and the page it came from attached.
The problem
An engineer needs one number: the temperature limit that applies to a line, the material qualification for a service, the rating a flange has to meet. The answer is in the documents. So are forty other numbers that look like it.
So they ask the person who knows. That person answers from memory, which is usually right and occasionally out of date, and the exchange leaves no record either way.
Search returns documents. An engineer needs the requirement that governs, which is a different thing entirely when four documents speak to the same parameter.
The one that matches your words is rarely the one that rules.
What an answer looks like
Anything an engineer will act on has to be checkable. Every answer names the document that governs, quotes the line, and says what it outranked to get there.
That is the same evidence a finding already carries today, asked a different way.
What minimum design temperature applies to line 4"-PG-1102?
−46 °C. Set by the approved deviation for this project, which overrides the limit stated in the project specification.
Illustrative. The answer carries the governing clause and what it superseded, so it can be used in a decision.
Where this is today
Engineering Q&A is a new way to ask a question of machinery that already exists. The library, the extraction and the precedence logic are in place and working; the question interface arrives in in development.
What it is for
Every one of these has a right answer sitting in the project documents, and every one currently costs a conversation.
Related
The same library and the same precedence that produce a finding.
FAQ
It is in development. The library, clause-level extraction and precedence it depends on are in place today, so what is being built is the way of asking rather than the reasoning behind the answer.
Search returns documents that match your words. This returns the requirement that governs, which is a different result when several documents speak to the same parameter and one of them outranks the rest.
Act on the clause, not the sentence. Every answer names the governing document and quotes the line, so it is verified against the source in seconds rather than taken on faith.
Your own standards, specifications, addenda and project documents. Nothing from outside the library you load, which is what makes the answer specific to your project rather than general.
Yes, and it should. Each project ranks its own documents, so the same question about the same parameter can have two different right answers on two jobs.
Talk to us. Early access is worth scoping around a project where the standards library is already loaded, since the quality of an answer follows the quality of what it reads.
Next step
What the answers are drawn from is worth loading now, and it earns its keep on review work in the meantime.