Semantic Tags for Interoperable Construction Workflow

The establishments of standards to exchange, share, and integrate information result from the full consensus within the construction industry and their enforcement by government institutions. However, even if these conditions are met, the unique features and the dynamic social network of a construction project hinder the standard's success in developing interoperability, and results in different actors' developing different views to represent the information in projects. Alternatively, other efforts have relied on mapping the actor's representations within an individual project, limiting their application to that particular project or only to projects where the same actors are involved. Construction project actors constitute social networks at different scales in time and in space that require a dynamic information workflow for exchanging, sharing, or integrating information. The actors' achievement of these inter-operations is critical in making the communication of information possible to, for example, coordinate processes and exchange resource constraints. The complexity of social network hinders the deliverance of the construction products and processes information. Semantic tags for interoperable construction workflows represent a novel approach to support the exchanging, sharing, and integrating of information. Semantic tags leverage the communication of information within the dynamic social network grid. This research proposes a semantic main form of representation of construction concepts to assist in the communication between actors. This semantic approach represents construction concepts within documents by employing a concept-description that holds metadata. The semantic tag, therefore, has the ability to represent the required information for particular interpreters because of its incorporation of categories of concepts employed in the construction domain.