Information and Knowledge Management in Building

Under this title, a set of technical meetings within the Conference enabled members of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building (CIB) and of the International Union of Building Centers (UICB) to come to grips with some of the major ‘information’ problems faced by the construction sector. These meetings fell under the aegis of CIB’s and UICB’s joint Working Commission W102; the Conference on Electronic Trade provided a challenging and contemporary context for the Commission’s members’ discussions.

Information management

Product information

Product information is affected by current trends in business process re-engineering and also by the need for building life-cycle storage of product information. In such a context, one can now expect a move towards

• semantically rich product catalogues with performance-based search capabilities (in the European context, work on product information should respect the CPD - Construction Product Directive - by referring to the stipulated ‘essential requirements’ that products must satisfy);
• reliance on electronic gateways rather than on direct access to product catalogues (in this context, one of the ‘facts of life’ is that there will be heterogeneous sources of information - the antithesis of standardized formats - and that the gateways will have to deal with the ensuing problems through research into classification systems and lean key-word lexicons);
• design integration, implying that information for product selection will be coupled to considerations about the type of product and the phase of building design and construction.

Access to information

System design work is proceeding with facilitating the access to information on Internet by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) - which, of course, predominate in the building sector and are also in greatest need of assistance.

For example, in Belgium, BBRI’s Internet Construction Guide aims at helping with search procedures on Internet; also a Prototype Belgian Internet Construction Community is being developed, notably by working on the problems of standards.

In Sweden, SMEs are also being helped through Byggdok’s prototyping of a system of Competitive Quotes for Building Materials; in this project, manufacturers of doors, windows and kitchen equipment are prequalified and then invited to quote in their respective areas; though currently Government sponsored, the aim is to have the producers pay for the privilege of having guaranteed access to an enlarged market of buyers.

There has to be some way of filtering information so that the user can trust it for its known reliability and appreciate its value; in this connection, an approach using ‘road-maps’ that lead to sectorial subdivisions of big data-bases seems appropriate (these ‘sectorial subdivisions’ potentially correspond to sectorial extranets)

‘Info-build’ (by CSIRO) is a broker-service to help industry to access accumulated research results and related knowledge (CSIRO has a ‘memory’ - its knowledge - stemming from over 80 years’ research).

Value added information

More generally, the future trend is for business to be interested in data-bases and not books; the challenge is how to make information on Internet more useful and therefore more valuable. In Sweden, it has been found that in the area of real estate, for example, the value of information is evident and therefore it can be charged for. In Australia, CSIRO has found that information on corrosion and on flood damage is of interest to the insurance industry who appreciate its economic worth. Also, code compliance and automatic access to complying products is an area of great potential value.

In this changing field, the economic trend is to emphasize (a) the broker’s role (where the broker connects one target to multiple sources of information) and (b) the user’s role (where personalized search profiles and selection processes are coupled to local storage of pertinent information).

Knowledge management

Knowledge management is a popular ‘buzz-word’ - it is often said that ‘everything is knowledge management’! Actually, it has many dimensions:

• intermediation: between those who have knowledge and those who need it,
• externalization: capturing and organizing information,
• internalization: filtering knowledge,
• cognition: decision-making based on knowledge,
• measurement: of the value of the knowledge (a tool for ‘selling’ knowledge management to a client).

A knowledge management system should be:

• context sensitive: why is information being sought?
• user sensitive,
• flexible: be able to work with old and new types of knowledge,
• heuristic: be intelligent in that it learns about the impact of changes,
• suggestive: be able to suggest information.

In the architecture/engineering/construction (AEC) field, there are currently no knowledge management systems applications, only research in progress; this research is closely linked to studies of project team management, and must reflect the demands of time-sensitive information management and inter/intra group interactions and audit trails. Stakeholder interests and privileges have to be taken into account - and in building these are often difficult to determine.