Developing Maps-Based Communities of Practice System for Exchanging Experience in Construction Projects

Knowledge management (KM) is the organization, creation, sharing and flow of knowledge within organizations. The knowledge can be reused and shared among the involved engineers and experts to improve the construction process and reduce the time and cost of solving problems. This paper proposes a new and practical methodology to capture and represent construction project knowledge by using network knowledge maps approach. Using Knowledge Maps, users can get an overview of available and missing knowledge in core project areas and take appropriate management in tacit and explicit knowledge. This study addresses application of knowledge management in the construction phase of construction projects and proposes a Construction Map-based Community of Practice system (MbCoPs) for contractors. The MbCoPs is then applied in selected cases study of a construction bridge project in Taiwan to verify our proposed methodology and demonstrate the effectiveness of sharing knowledge special in the construction phase. By developing communities of practice system, all participants in the project can share explicit and tacit knowledge according to the interesting topic through the web-based platform anytime and anywhere. The combined results demonstrate that, an MbCoPs-like system can be an effective tool for construction knowledge managements in construction industries by utilizing the map -based knowledge approach and web technology.