The management of data related to prototypes created during new product development is seen as a beneficial yet challenging activity. While attempts have been made to understand prototypes and their context in a range of use-cases, there is a gap in the understanding of the data that captures a prototype’s context and physical form. This paper highlights this gap, and addresses it through the development of a new taxonomy. Using existing literature, a body of domain-specific terms, and the combined experience of the nine authors, a robust and systematic taxonomy development process was followed. A comparison of the developed and pre-existing taxonomies, and an illustrative example, is used for evaluation. The taxonomy is fully presented along with a description of each of the 53 dimensions, and it is intended to be the foundation upon which methods and processes can be developed to improve the capture, curation and integration of physical prototypes in new product development.

新产品开发过程中创建的原型相关数据的管理被视为一项有益但具有挑战性的活动。尽管已经尝试在一系列用例中理解原型及其上下文，但对捕获原型上下文和物理形式的数据的理解存在差距。本文强调了这一差距，并通过开发新的分类法来解决它。利用现有文献、一系列特定领域术语以及九位作者的综合经验，遵循了稳健且系统的分类学开发过程。使用已开发的分类法和现有分类法的比较以及说明性示例进行评估。该分类法连同对 53 个维度中每一个维度的描述一起完整呈现，旨在成为开发方法和流程的基础，以改进新产品开发中物理原型的捕获、管理和集成。