Because of the increasing complexity of products and the design process, as well as the popularity of computer-aided documentation tools, the number of electronic and textual design documents being generated has exploded. The availability of such extensive document resources has created new challenges and opportunities for research. These include improving design information retrieval to achieve a more coherent environment for design exploration, learning, and reuse. One critical issue is related to the construction of a structured representation for indexing design documents that record engineers’ ideas and reasoning processes for a specific design. This representation should explicitly and accurately capture the important design concepts as well as the relationships between these concepts so that engineers can locate their documents of interest with less effort. For design information retrieval, we propose to use shallow natural language processing and domain-specific design ontol...