A Social Web Approach to Managing Information and Knowledge in the AEC Industry

Abstract

As Social applications have begun to dominate the Internet and changed the way in which people communicate, there is a need to study the application of Social concepts in managing information and knowledge. This paper discusses the potential for using four types of social interaction (social tagging, wiki, blogging, and social networking) in the AEC industry. Keywords-Social Web; 2.0; knowledge management; wiki; publish/subscribe; AEC industry; construction The intrinsic complexity of the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry stems from its multidisciplinary involvement. Each and every construction project typically has to deal with many heterogeneous engineering, business, and social systems which are governed by a hierarchy of government bureaucracies and private enterprises. With this great complexity, the effective management of information and knowledge has become a key strategy embraced by many organizations in this industry to enhance overall competence. Along with the advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), researchers have begun to investigate ICT-based tools for better managing information and knowledge. At the beginning of the new millennium, there was a noticeable shift in how people used the and how businesses developed Web-based applications. Now, more and more, applications are offering their users brand new experiences in social interaction with the system or even other users (e.g. social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc.) The common feature of these applications is that they use the as an interacting platform to create collaborative and community-based services. Tim O'Reilly named this new paradigm using the term Web (1). Most 2.0 applications support the social interaction of users, and thus it is also called the Social Web. This paper discusses the potential application of Social concepts in managing information and knowledge in the AEC industry. Following a brief introduction of knowledge management (KM) and its practice in the AEC industry, Social principles and applications will be discussed. The emphasis of this paper will be on four possible application areas: social tagging in publish/subscribe systems to enrich expressiveness, wiki sites to document domain knowledge, blogs to share in-depth knowledge of a specialized area, and social networking sites to link people in industry who share similar interests. II. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN THE AEC INDUSTRY