Social Semantic Approach to Support Communication in AEC

Abstract

Communication systems in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry face many challenges. This paper proposes construction information and knowledge portal (CIKP), an information and knowledge-management system that utilizes three technologies to address the challenges in information exchange and knowledge sharing. First, a semantic web that is unlike typical data-exchange standards because ontologies present human knowledge in a machine-interpretable manner. This provides for more linguistic-friendly representation of tacit/subjective knowledge, which increases the level of human-friendliness of communication systems. Second, a social web, which links people (instead of documents) to create communities of practice (CoPs) and allows people to share, reconfigure, and generate knowledge. Finally, publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems, which provide for a push-pull scenario for information exchange. In the proposed system, any knowledge item (KI) (e.g., a document, website, and blog) will be represented (tagged) with a semantic vector that describes its contents. The developer of the KI can push (share) this to his or her social network. On the other end of the spectrum, system users can build semantic profiles for their areas of expertise and/or interests. The system can pull (find) the most relevant KIs and forward them to the user. The system can also link peers with similar or complementary interest to one another to establish virtual ad hoc teams. The system was evaluated through input from two focus groups.