Document Discourse for Managing Construction Project Documents

Abstract

Several important aspects characterize construction project documents. Large numbers of documents are produced in construction projects. The majority of the documents are unstructured textual documents. The production of documents is a gradual process that extends over the duration of the project. Documents, as information carriers, are an important repository of project knowledge. Project information is recorded, disputed, revised, and reiterated in various successive documents producing links between these documents and creating groups of semantically related documents within the project corpus. Despite the difficulties imposed on document management efforts by these characteristics, an electronic document management (EDM) approach must take into account these features in order to successfully manage project documents. In this study, a prototype electronic document management system (EDMS) that capitalizes on the various aspects that characterize project documents is presented. The system is based on the document discourse concept, which recognizes the semantic relations between groups of documents. The system also employs a text analysis feature which was evaluated for accuracy of classification based on document discourse and produced satisfactory results. The prototype system was evaluated using expert review. The main finding of the review recommends implementation of document discourse management as a module of an integrated project management system to achieve the best and most practical application.