SAE Launches Second 'TechKnowledge Center'

WARRENDALE, Pa., Oct. 29, 2003 -- SAE International (Society of Automotive Engineers) has launched the "Powertrain TechKnowledge Center," the second product in the SAE TechKnowledge Center series. This is one of several planned enterprise technical publications that help to shorten the gap between information and knowledge.

The Powertrain TechKnowledge Center provides complete access to topically-focused, full-text SAE documents in three content collections: Spark Ignition, Compression Ignition, and Emissions. The information is seamlessly integrated with supplemental relevant content from internal and external sources, and is combined with editorial content, interpretation, and analysis.

"The individual engineer is inundated with information which must be sifted through to glean pertinent information for their current project," said Ray Morris, SAE Executive Vice President. "SAE TechKnowledge Centers provide all the critical content in one place - content that has already been reviewed for relevancy and can be immediately searched and sorted based on an individual's needs."

Customization is one of the key values in this product line. Driven by leading-edge portal technology, the SAE TechKnowledge Centers include personalization features, alert services, browsing capabilities, regular content updates, and extensively linked bibliographic records. The search interface - a key component of the product - offers precision retrieval of information, the ability to save and revise search criteria, and sort and save results.

Each Center will have unique editorial content including articles that examine a critical topic or a prevailing issue that will be extremely relevant to various types of subscribers. Further value is provided through embedded links that go directly to SAE documents (Standards, Papers, Magazines) that support or expand on the article's topic. The editor shapes and filters the content, monitors hundreds of websites for additional relevant information, and alerts the user to important news. This type of associative, context-rich environment helps the user efficiently find and utilize the available content and creates on-the-spot concept relationships and building blocks of knowledge.

"SAE TechKnowledge Centers also provide a tremendous benefit to businesses," Morris noted. "These products facilitate a quicker transfer of information to knowledge, and the steady stream of critical, consistent, and continuous information helps engineers maintain a competitive advantage."

The initial product offering in this series is the Safety TechKnowledge Center, which was launched in March, 2003. To learn more about any of the SAE TechKnowledge Centers or for information about SAE's other Knowledge Products initiatives, please contact Theresa Wertz at 724.772.8500 or via email at wertz@sae.org .