When I joined NAFEMS in 2014 I was blown away by the volume of resources that came into the organisation on a weekly basis. This material in the form of papers, recordings, books, and magazine articles was created by our technical working groups or presented by engineers attending seminars and conferences and was hosted on our website. Access to this information was provided to NAFEMS members as part of their membership package, but as all this information was hosted across various sections of nafems.org, it was difficult to find, and the true value of this huge repository of knowledge was not immediately apparent.

In 2016 we launched the NAFEMS resource centre to provide a single location through which our members can access all this information. This is now, we believe, the largest archive of material related to engineering simulation in the world. In a typical year over 1000 new resources are added. Our members now know exactly where to go to find information but as the number of resources grew, finding the right ones started to become a challenge. Filters were developed to allow members to cut through the data by date, organisation, author, language etc but it was still a challenge to find relevant material. We started an initiative to “tag” resources but due to breath of technology covered by NAFEMS the number of tags soon became unmanageable and difficult to navigate. In addition, the tagging process was manual and time consuming.

It was at this point that we decided to change tack and our Technical Officer, Márton Groza, started to investigate if AI search could provide a solution.