Python-assisted biological knowledge acquisition method to trigger design inspiration

Design inspiration comes from the continuous stimulation of external information and the continuous accumulation of knowledge. In order to obtain an ideal design inspiration from nature, researchers have proposed a large number of biological information retrieval and knowledge acquisition methods. But how to purposefully acquire valuable biological knowledge in order to effectively stimulate design inspiration and produce the novel and feasible designs idea is still an urgent problem to be solved. This paper proposes a method for acquiring valuable biological knowledge to efficiently stimulate inspiration and quickly conceive solutions in engineering design. First, keywords, such as the functional requirements and key components of design objects, are selected as the engineering terminologies. Next, biological keywords related to the engineering terminologies are searched from the biological dictionary and biology websites. Then in order to retrieve enough biological knowledge, these biological keywords are expanded manually and automatically respectively based on Thesaurus Webpage and WordNet database, and expanded keywords are filtered according to repeated words and different forms of the same words. Finally, in the biological knowledge base, biological keywords that had been filtered are used to obtain biological knowledge with Python web crawler programming. Through an example of application for ship equipment, the effectiveness of the method is verified.