Bridge Deterioration Knowledge Ontology for Supporting Bridge Document Analytics
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 148, Issue 6
Abstract
Bridge owners possess important data sources, such as bridge construction records and inspection and maintenance reports, which hold great promise for improving understanding of bridge deterioration and informing maintenance decision making. However, the valuable data buried in these documents are not being fully exploited due to their unstructured nature. Domain-specific semantics are needed to facilitate analysis of the data based on content and domain-specific meaning and to bridge terminology gaps across different sources. To address this need, this paper proposes a bridge ontology (BridgeOnto) that captures deterioration knowledge and semantics related to bridge elements, deficiencies, deficiency causes, and maintenance actions. The proposed ontology was evaluated through answering competency questions, automated consistency and redundancy checking, expert interviews, and application-oriented validation. The BridgeOnto was implemented in supporting automated extraction of information describing bridge conditions and maintenance actions from bridge inspection reports. The experimental results show that the ontology was able to improve information extraction precision, recall, and F-1 measure by 11.7%, 12.4%, and 12.0%, on average. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by offering an ontology that can capture the key deterioration knowledge areas with sufficient coverage and in-depth classification for achieving adequate support for bridge document analytics. By allowing better access to and use of crucial textual data, this research has the potential to improve the understanding of bridge deterioration and enhance maintenance decisions.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation (NSF). This paper is based on work supported by NSF under Grant No. 1937115. Funding for this research was also provided in part by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through the NCSA Faculty Fellows program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the aforementioned entities.
References
AASHTO. 1997. AASHTO guide for commonly recognized (core) structural elements. Washington, DC: AASHTO.
AASHTO. 2007. AASHTO maintenance manual for roadways and bridges. Washington, DC: AASHTO.
AASHTO. 2009. AASHTO transportation glossary. Washington, DC: AASHTO.
AASHTO. 2010. AASHTO bridge element inspection guide manual. Washington, DC: AASHTO.
ACI (American Concrete Institute). 2013. “Cementitious materials for concrete.” Accessed August 20, 2020. https://www.concrete.org/store/productdetail.aspx?ItemID=E313.
APA (The Engineered Wood Association). 2016. “Chemical resistance.” Accessed August 20, 2020. http://www.performancepanels.com/chemical-resistance.
ASCE. 2001. “Types and causes of defects and deterioration.” Accessed August 20, 2020. http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/9780784405451.apb.
ASCE. 2021. “Report card for America’s infrastructure.” Accessed October 9, 2021. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/.
Bien, J., K. Jakubowski, T. Kamiński, J. Kmita, P. Kmita, P. J. Cruz, and M. Maksymowicz. 2007. “Railway bridge defects and degradation mechanisms.” In Proc., Sustainable Bridges -Assessment for Future Traffic Demands and Longer Lives, 105–116. Wrocław, Poland: Dolnoslaskie Wydawnictwo Edukacyjne.
Bijen, J. 2003. Durability of engineering structures: Design, repair and maintenance. Cambridge, UK: Woodhead Publishing.
Bird, S., E. Loper, and E. Klein. 2009. Natural language processing with Python. Newton, MA: O’Reilly Media.
BTS (Bureau of Transportation Statistics). 2015. “Transportation expressions/transportation acronym guide.” Accessed August 20, 2020. https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/dictionary/index.xml.
BuildingSMART. 2020a. “IFC bridge.” Accessed August 20, 2020. https://www.buildingsmart.org/standards/rooms/infrastructure/ifc-bridge/.
BuildingSMART. 2020b. “IFC infrastructure.” Accessed August 20, 2020. https://www.buildingsmart.org/standards/rooms/infrastructure/.
Cerullo, D., K. Sennah, H. Azimi, C. Lam, A. Fam, and B. Tharmabala. 2013. “Experimental study on full-scale pretensioned bridge girder damaged by vehicle impact and repaired with fiber-reinforced polymer technology.” J. Compos. Constr. 17 (5): 662–672. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CC.1943-5614.0000383.
Delatte, N., ed. 2009. Failure, distress and repair of concrete structures. Cambridge, UK: Woodhead Publishing.
El-Diraby, T. E., and K. F. Kashif. 2005. “Distributed ontology architecture for knowledge management in highway construction.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage. 131 (5): 591–603. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(2005)131:5(591).
El-Diraby, T. E., and H. Osman. 2011. “A domain ontology for construction concepts in urban infrastructure products.” Autom. Constr. 20 (8): 1120–1132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2011.04.014.
El-Gohary, N. M., and T. E. El-Diraby. 2010. “Domain ontology for processes in infrastructure and construction.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage. 136 (7): 730–744. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000178.
Farhey, D. N. 2014. “Operational structural performances of bridge materials by deterioration trends.” J. Perform. Constr. Facil. 28 (1): 168–177. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CF.1943-5509.0000400.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 1995. Recording and coding guide for the structure inventory and appraisal of the nation’s bridges. Washington, DC: FHWA.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 2012. Bridge inspectors’ reference manual. Washington, DC: FHWA.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 2013. “Bridges by year built, year reconstructed and material type 2013.” Accessed August 20, 2020. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/no10/yrblt_yrreconst13.cfm.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 2014. “Specification for the national bridge inventory bridge elements.” Accessed August 20, 2020. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/131216_a1.pdf.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 2021a. “About LTBP.” Accessed June 18, 2021. https://cms7.fhwa.dot.gov/research/long-term-infrastructure-performance/ltbp/about-ltbp.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 2021b “Bridge deck condition rating forecast—Machine learning models.” Accessed June 18, 2021. https://highways.dot.gov/research/long-term-infrastructure-performance/ltbp/data-analysis/bridge-deck-condition-rating-machine.
FHWA (Federal Highway Administration). 2021c. “LTBP bridge performance primer.” Accessed June 18, 2021. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/infrastructure/structures/ltbp/13051/.
Gimmer, A. E. 1984. A glossary of historic masonry deterioration problems and preservation treatments. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior.
Gomez-Perez, A., M. Fernández-López, and O. Corcho. 2006. Ontological engineering: With examples from the areas of knowledge management, e-commerce and the semantic web. Berlin: Springer.
Gruber, T. R. 1995. “Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing?” Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 43 (5): 907–928. https://doi.org/10.1006/ijhc.1995.1081.
Grüninger, M., and M. S. Fox. 1995. “Methodology for the design and evaluation of ontologies.” In Proc., Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence. Menlo Park, CA: American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Guo, B. H. W., and Y. M. Goh. 2017. “Ontology for design of active fall protection systems.” Autom. Constr. 82 (Oct): 138–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2017.02.009.
Halfawy, F. C., F. C. Hadipriono, J. Duane, and R. Larew. 2005. Development of model-based systems for integrated design of highway bridges. Ontario: National Research Council Canada.
Hobbs, D. W. 2013. “Concrete deterioration: Causes, diagnosis, and minimising risk.” Int. Mater. Rev. 46 (3): 117–144. https://doi.org/10.1179/095066001101528420.
Hüthwohl, P., I. Brilakis, A. Borrmann, and R. Sacks. 2018. “Integrating RC bridge defect information into BIM models.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng. 30 (3): 04018013. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000744.
Kambhatla, N. 2004. “Combining lexical, syntactic, and semantic features with maximum entropy models for information extraction.” In Proc., ACL Interactive Poster & Demonstration Sessions, 178–181. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kubota, S., and I. Mikami. 2013. “Development of product data model for maintenance in concrete highway bridges.” Appl. Comput. Intell. Soft Comput. 2013: 1–12.https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/148785.
Lee, D.-Y., H.-L. Chi, J. Wang, X. Wang, and C.-S. Park. 2016. “A linked data system framework for sharing construction defect information using ontologies and BIM environments.” Autom. Constr. 68 (Aug): 102–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2016.05.003.
Liu, K., and N. El-Gohary. 2017. “Ontology-based semi-supervised conditional random fields for automated information extraction from bridge inspection reports.” Autom. Constr. 81 (Sep): 313–327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2017.02.003.
Liu, K., and N. El-Gohary. 2021. “Semantic neural network ensemble for automated dependency relation extraction from bridge inspection reports.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng. 35 (4): 04021007. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000961.
Marcus, M., M. Marcinkiewicz, and B. Santorini. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania.
Moradi, H., M. H. Sebt, and E. Shakeri. 2018. “Toward improving the quality compliance checking of urban private construction in Iran: An ontological approach.” Sustainable Cities Soc. 38 (Apr): 137–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2017.12.015.
NCHRP (National Cooperative Highway Research Program). 2011. Framework for a national database system for maintenance actions on highway bridges. Washington, DC: NCHRP.
NCHRP (National Cooperative Highway Research Program). 2014. Proposed guideline for reliability-based bridge inspection practices. Washington, DC: NCHRP.
NYSDOT (New York State DOT). 2015. “New York State Department of Transportation bridge inspection report.” Accessed October 10, 2021. https://www.dot.ny.gov/main/business-center/designbuildproject20/repository/2015%20Bridge%20Inspection%20Report%20-%2020151228.pdf.
Osman, H., and T. El-Diraby. 2006. “Ontological modeling of infrastructure products and related concepts.” Transp. Res. Board 1984 (1): 159–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361198106198400115.
PCA (Portland Cement Association). 2015. “Types and causes of concrete deterioration.” Accessed August 20, 2020. http://www.cement.org/docs/default-source/th-paving-pdfs/concrete/types-and-causes-of-concrete-deterioration-is536.pdf.
PCA (Portland Cement Association). 2016. “Acid resistance.” Accessed August 20, 2020. http://www.cement.org/for-concrete-books-learning/concrete-technology/durability/acid-resistance.
Rogers, H. 2006. Bridge preservation in PennDOT. Washington, DC: Pennsylvania DOT.
Seedah, D. P., C. Choubassi, and F. Leite. 2016. “Ontology for querying heterogeneous data sources in freight transportation.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng. 30 (4): 04015069. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000548.
Soysal, E., I. Cicekli, and N. Baykal. 2010. “Design and evaluation of an ontology based information extraction system for radiological reports.” Comput. Biol. Med. 40 (11): 900–911. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2010.10.002.
Taivalsaari, A. 1996. Classes vs. prototypes: Some, philosophical and historical observations. Helsinki, Finland: Nokia Research Center.
TRB (Transportation Research Board). 2015. “Transportation research thesaurus.” Accessed August 20, 2020. http://trt.trb.org/trt.asp?.
Tsochantaridis, I., T. Joachims, T. Hofmann, and Y. Altun. 2005. “Large margin methods for structured and interdependent output variables.” J. Mach. Learn. Res. 6 (9): 453–1484.
Ulieru, M., and S. A. Madani. 2006. “An application of industrial agents to concrete bridge monitoring.” In Proc., 3rd Int. Conf. on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization. Berlin: Springer.
USACE. 1995. Evaluation and repair of concrete structures. Washington, DC: USACE.
Vrandečić, D. 2009. “Ontology evaluation.” In Handbook on ontologies. Berlin: Springer.
Wimalasuriya, D. C., and D. Dou. 2010. “Ontology-based information extraction: An introduction and a survey of current approaches.” J. Inf. Sci. 36 (3): 306–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551509360123.
Woodson, R. D. 2009. Concrete structures: Protection, repair and rehabilitation. 1st ed. Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann.
WSDOT (Wisconsin Department of Transportation). 2015. “Maintenance and operations.” Accessed August 20, 2020. http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/publications/manuals/fulltext/M31-11/700.pdf.
Xi, Y., Y. Jing, and R. Railsback. 2018. Surface chloride levels in Colorado structural concrete. Denver: Colorado DOT.
Zeb, J., and T. M. Froese. 2013. “Tangible capital asset ontology towards standardized reporting in infrastructure management.” In Proc., 4th CSCE Construction Specialty Conf. Québec: Canadian Society for Civil Engineering.
Zhang, J., and N. El-Gohary. 2016. “Semantic NLP-based information extraction from construction regulatory documents for automated compliance checking.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng. 30 (2): 04015014. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000346.
Zhou, P., and N. El-Gohary. 2016. “Ontology-based multilabel text classification of construction regulatory documents.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng. 30 (4): 04015058. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000530.
Zhou, P., and N. El-Gohary. 2017. “Ontology-based automated information extraction from building energy conservation codes.” Autom. Constr. 74 (Feb): 103–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2016.09.004.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 148 • Issue 6 • June 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 25, 2021
Accepted: Sep 10, 2021
Published online: Mar 28, 2022
Published in print: Jun 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Aug 28, 2022
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.
Cited by
- Chuanni He, Min Liu, Simon M. Hsiang, Nicholas Pierce, Synthesizing Ontology and Graph Neural Network to Unveil the Implicit Rules for US Bridge Preservation Decisions, Journal of Management in Engineering, 10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-5803, 40, 3, (2024).
- Yali Jiang, Gang Yang, Haijiang Li, Tian Zhang, Ali Khudhair, Physics-Informed Knowledge-Driven Decision-Making Framework for Holistic Bridge Maintenance, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 10.1061/JCEMD4.COENG-13593, 150, 9, (2024).
- Xi Hu, Kaijian Liu, Structural Deterioration Knowledge Ontology towards Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Enhanced Bridge Deterioration Prediction, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0001066, 37, 1, (2023).
- Yang Zhang, Yuhong Liu, Guangting Lei, Shengyu Liu, Peng Liang, An Enhanced Information Retrieval Method Based on Ontology for Bridge Inspection, Applied Sciences, 10.3390/app122010599, 12, 20, (10599), (2022).