Epistemology of Construction Informatics

Abstract

Informatics deal with knowledge management and not just information technology, which, by its very nature, is social, cognitive, and tied to linguistics and human communication. Consequently, philosophy plays a major role in informatics because one has to understand in a human and not artificial way the meaning of concepts, their relationships, and their frames of references (context). Over the last few years, this has manifested in the development of many ontologies (a formal description of what knowledge is known). Epistemology, the means by which one knows or creates assumptions about knowledge, did not receive its due attention. This paper establishes the need for investigating the epistemological foundations of construction informatics systems, reviews related schools of epistemology in general philosophy and in that of science, reviews the rather limited and indirect use of epistemology in construction research, and presents a proposal for an epistemology for construction informatics. Such epistemology is meant to act as guidelines for the development of informatics systems and, more importantly, the ontologies they use. The proposed epistemology (1) advocates the use of constructivist models (bottom-up approach) at the microlevel (individual models) within a contemporary pragmatic framework, i.e., acceptance of dualism and probabilistic coexistence and focus on usability and benefit to users, at the macrolevel in which models should be linked to one other effectively to present a value for users; (2) emphasizes the need for context modeling along with concept modeling; (3) calls for balancing object orientation (top-down standardization) with prototype orientation (discovery and situational awareness) in concept development; and (4) balancing communication (linguistic orientation) along with the prevailing reasoning orientation.