E-Society Portal: Integrating Urban Highway Construction Projects into the Knowledge City
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 131, Issue 11
Abstract
Community involvement is an important factor for sustainable highway construction. Information and communication technologies provide a new and more effective approach to facilitate community involvement. However, there are too many parameters with conflicting and subjective definitions related to sustainability and too many stakeholders with varying degrees of interest and sophistication. There is a need for an effective tool to communicate project impacts on sustainability to local communities. This paper presents an ontology for stakeholder management and sustainability in highway construction. An ontology is a conceptual semantic model that attempts to capture human knowledge (both explicit and tacit) in a consistent manner. Ontologies include three main elements: a taxonomy (common vocabulary presented in concept trees), set of relationships (linking concepts across trees), and axioms (limitation/constraints on the behavior of concepts). The ontology was used to develop a portal for broadcasting highway design features to local communities. By browsing through the portal, a user can learn about project elements, the impacts of each element on sustainability issues, who is sponsoring such element, and what efforts have been made to reduce any impacts of such elements on local communities.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 131 • Issue 11 • November 2005
Pages: 1196 - 1211
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Received: Jan 19, 2005
Accepted: Jun 24, 2005
Published online: Nov 1, 2005
Published in print: Nov 2005
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