An advanced knowledge management and collaboration system in semantic web environment for construction organisations

Abstract

Construction projects usually involve a large number of individuals and organisations and they are information and knowledge intensive, therefore smooth communication is essential for the success of construction projects. Recently, web-based applications are increasingly used for project collaboration in the industry. However, although the conventional web has high capacity to store large amount of data and information, it has many limitations for efficient information retrieval and knowledge sharing. This paper presents an advanced semantic web environment and the collaboration tools developed based on it. Tentative implementation is carried out into an online collaboration system and the features and functionalities of the semantic web-based tools are illustrated. The paper also proposes different tools/strategies for large and small construction organisations, respectively, considering the differences between them.