Abstract
With ongoing advancements in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in all stages of the construction lifecycle, information from entities related to construction workflow (CW) can now be automatically collected. These implementations are point solutions, which require systematic integration to combine their information to enable a holistic picture of CW. The major barrier to such integration is information heterogeneity, where the information is collected from different systems under multiple contexts. Scholars in the construction domain have explored the use of ontology to solve the information-integration problem, although an ontology that both adequately represents the CW and integrates the digitalized information of CW via various systems and multiple contexts is currently missing from the existing literature. This research thus presents an ontology set for formalizing and integrating CW information within the digital construction context. The proposed digital construction ontologies (DiCon) are shared representations of construction domain knowledge that specify the terms and relations of CWs and their related information. We developed the DiCon based on a hybrid ontology development approach. The DiCon includes six modules: Entities, Processes, Information, Agents, Variables, and Contexts. The developed DiCon was further evaluated by approaches including automatic consistency checking, criteria-based evaluation, expert workshops, and task-based evaluation and involved two use cases by answering relevant competency questions via SPARQL queries. The results of the evaluation demonstrate that the DiCon ontologies are sufficient to represent domain knowledge and can formalize and integrate CW information within the digital construction context.
Highlights
The construction process is driven by information
Scholars in the con struction domain have explored the use of ontology to solve the information-integration problem, an ontology that both adequately represents the construction workflow (CW) and integrates the digitalized information of CW via various systems and multiple contexts is currently missing from the existing literature
To fill this research gap, in this paper we propose a suite of ontologies called the digital construction ontologies (DiCon), where we aim to offer a higher-level conceptualization and formalization of CW with shared and reusable domain knowledge representation
Summary
Information is vital for site teams to be aware of the actual situations of construction workflows (CWs), and their related resources and constraints, in order to support timely decision-making and action-taking [1]. Various researchers have suggested that tracking project-related entities and phenomena at worksites can provide useful information for inter preting the situation of the CW [3,4,5]. Previous works have shown that various CW-related entities can be tracked or monitored by using digi talized technologies including sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) [6,7,8], indoor positioning systems (IPSs) to track labor flows [9], and computer vision/image processing to monitor equipment [10,11]
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