Ontology in the AEC Industry: A Decade of Research and Development in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

Technical documents with complicated structures are often produced in architecture/engineering/construction (AEC) projects and research. Information retrieval (IR) techniques provide a possible solution for managing the ever-growing volume and contexts of the knowledge embedded in these technical documents. However, applying a general-purpose search engine to a domain-specific technical document collection often produces unsatisfactory results. To address this problem, we research the development of a novel IR system based on passage retrieval techniques. The system employs domain knowledge to assist passage partitioning and supports an interactive concept-based expanded IR for technical documents in an engineering field. The engineering domain selected in this case is earthquake engineering, although the technologies developed and employed by the system should be generally applicable to many other engineering domains that use technical documents with similar characteristics.

We carry out the research in a three-step process. In the first step, since the final output of this research is an IR system, as a prerequisite, we created a reference collection which includes 111 earthquake engineering technical documents from Taiwan’s National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering. With this collection, the effectiveness of the IR system can be further evaluated once it is developed. In the second step, the research focuses on creating a base domain ontology using an earthquake-engineering handbook to represent the domain knowledge and to support the target IR system with the knowledge. In step three, the research focuses on the semantic querying and retrieval mechanisms and develops the OntoPassage approach to help with the mechanisms. The Onto Passage approach partitions a document into smaller passages, each with around 300 terms, according to the main concepts in the document. This approach is then used to implement the target domain knowledge–based IR system that allows users to interact with the system and perform concept-based query expansions. The results show that the proposed domain knowledge–based IR system can achieve not only an effective IR but also inform search engine users with a clear knowledge representation.

This research addresses semantic interoperability by conceptually exploring the activities of communication when individuals aim dissimilar commitments to concept meanings in construction projects (i.e., addressing multiple commitments to the meanings of the same object or, alternatively, multiple ways to define such object). This research proposes a conceptual approach based on relevance theory to conceptually define multiple independent knowledge contexts in projects, which are user, community of practices, and modeler contexts. The conceptual approach gives clarity on the way the commitments to the meaning of representations take place in construction projects. The approach is pragmatic since it is concerned with the importance of the project participant dynamic as fundamental conceptual elements. The approach defines ontological categorizations to analyze the project social fabric, which dynamic establishes its underlying mechanisms. The claim is that when the dynamic is captured by the use of mediation technology, it is possible to register the participants’ positive cognitive effect and cognitive processing effort. Such effects and efforts are in terms of perception, memory, and inference, required to choose an input from the mass of competing stimuli. Therefore, the underlying mechanism mirrors the dynamic of social fabric for the participants, which translates into what is relevant to the participant within the context. To demonstrate this approach using mediation information technologies, this project built as semantic resource system, Wiki-Con. Semantic resources are all sort of artifacts with mediation meaning capability through sign systems. Wiki-con’s functionality is akin to a knowledge broker system. At the core of the Wiki-Con system is domain ontology that focuses on relating concepts from independent knowledge context rather than on building formal concept-correctness using formal linguistic-rigor. Wiki-Con serves as controlled vocabulary engine, which in turns provides class (concept) definitions for the construction project.

Ontologies have become increasingly prevalent in healthcare for managing a wide range of information. They help to keep patient information and other records compliant with electronic data standards and, are also used, to a lesser extent, for the management of healthcare facilities’ automated building control systems, sensors, and work order systems. Despite research that documents the importance of the condition of the physical environment for patient care and safety, a gap exists between the clinical and facility management systems within healthcare. They do not communicate or interact with each other to transfer valuable information needed for facility management’s response to a critical event. In order to address this problem a healthcare facility information management system is proposed and designed with an ontology to help facility managers retrieve, track, and store relevant real-time clinical and facility management information. This chapter summarizes ontology efforts in both the healthcare and facility management industries. It also discusses the methodology used to design the healthcare facility management system, identified critical links between facility management and clinical information, and the developed ontology used to support facility management response to critical events.

A typical construction project involves many parties with different objectives. Sustainable construction requires multi-dimensional thinking of social, economic and environmental implications. Therefore, a meaningful analysis of sustainable design options depends on a large amount of economic, technical and environmental data from a life cycle perspective. Although a significant amount of effort has already been put into research and development of integrated solutions that address traditional project objectives such as time, cost, safety and quality, environmental impacts represent a new dimension and need to be integrated with other project objectives. This chapter discusses the need for an ontology-based solution to integrate environmental protection considerations into project performance assessment. An ontology representation of integrated time, cost and environmental impacts (TCEI), called TCEI-Ontology, is presented. Ideas of reusing concepts in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) are also discussed. The potential application of TCEI-Ontology to solve integration issues in time, cost and environmental impact analyses is illustrated with a case study. Further development and tests are needed to determine the feasibility and the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.

There is no such thing as an isolated piece of knowledge. Networks of unstructured information sources are created and linked online daily. The proliferation of such extended sources of knowledge has caused a shift in the design of informatics systems from rule-based approaches (which dominated formal ontology) to statistical or mining-based approaches. Such shift is clearly manifested when we compare the nature and structure of IBM’s Deep Blue computer (which relied on procedural and logical steps to reason about Chess) and the new Watson computer (which relies on probabilistic and semantic analysis of unstructured web-based material).

It is argued that changes to ontology development are needed to meet the challenges and make use of the opportunities of extended online sources of knowledge. This starts by shifting the epistemological foundations of modern informatics ontology from positivism to constructivism, and replacing foundationalism with coherentism. The traditional desire for using ontology in reasoning should be complemented by an equal belief in the value of the representational role of ontology. Equally important, the belief in the role of ontology as a (static) formal encapsulation of knowledge should be balanced with a new belief in the role of ontology in discovering and integrating new knowledge from extended sources. Axioms must be limited and geared towards listing what is rejected instead of enumerating what is true. Entity structures must be flatter and closer to a network format instead of the tree-like format of taxonomies. The ontology must also interact with a set of auxiliary services that are needed to help customize ontology elements to match the context of its application, integrate new discovered knowledge; and for self-healing of axioms with new acquired knowledge.

In proposing these, and in true adherence to coherentism and constructivism, the author is not advocating that the implementation of these tools is the correct approach or an approach that is applicable to all situation.

The term “Serious Gaming” or “Gaming with a purpose” describes the combination of game concepts and methods with other information technologies in “serious” fields of applications. In the context of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) domain Serious Games have the potential to achieve additional value beyond pure entertainment. During the game design process the thematic background (in the presented case the AEC background) of a Serious Game is of particular importance. This requires domain-specific knowledge, usually represented by domain-experts (civil engineers and architects) as part of the game development team. A challenging task of the design process is the creation of game objects to model the game world. In the presented case these game objects are based on common AEC objects (like wall, floor, window, door etc.) with some additional information about their role in the game scenario like interactive behavior or different states during the game timeline. To enhance the AEC objects information about the implicit meaning of each object is required. This includes a time-consuming reasoning and decision-making process based on the experts experience in the application domain. However, it is assumed that this currently limits the application of Serious Gaming in the AEC domain. To solve this problem the presented research approach tries to retrieve most of the required knowledge automatically form a knowledge base (KB). This KB consists of digital content, which is already created during the Building Information Modeling (BIM) process. The challenge here is to displace the interpretation of information from the expert into a computer system. This requires a formalization of knowledge that could be derived from existing data and captured by an ontology, including a set of concepts and relationships between those concepts within the application domain.

The present chapter introduces an ontology-based approach to support Serious Game design by enabling automatic creation of game design documents and game content using BIM data as a KB. For creating the KB for the presented use case, single AEC objects were enriched with additional information (e.g. events for interaction, animations, artwork, textures) about their role in the game with semantic technologies. This approach has the potential, that Serious Gaming becomes a common engineering method for daily practice, because data that are already incurred in the BIM process can be integrated and reused with minor effort.

This chapter introduces a fieldwork-based method for end-user engaged ontology development. Our approach complements existing methodologies that, despite their aims to consult end-users and domain experts, have not yet formally spelled out steps for end-user engagement in detail. The method we introduce is based on ethnographic-action research. This grassroots approach allows developers to create feasible ontologies that closely fit end-user needs. Being based on fieldwork, this method extends conventional desk-research and expert-panel methods for data acquisition, conceptualization and validation to more meaningfully derive objects and relations that closely match the work routines of practitioners that eventually use ontologies. This chapter reviews existing post-development methods for end-user involvement and shows how these methods can be complemented with a grounded approach such as ethnographic-action research. We demonstrate the method by developing a semi-formal domain ontology for the subsurface utility construction domain.

Municipal organizations use a range of information systems to manage their infrastructure systems. Issues associated with these information systems include the fact that the underlying data formats’ heterogeneity cause interoperability problems; and data are commonly exchanged between various agencies in a manual and ad hoc way. The growing trend is to transform the current practice of manual data exchange to a more formalized computer-to-computer-based information exchange. For computers to talk to each, the data exchanges need to be defined in a computer interpretable format—the ontology.

This chapter presents the detailed development and evaluation of two ontologies and briefly introduce their application. The Transaction Domain Ontology was developed to represent knowledge about information transactions to support the design, management and implementation of transactions in the area of infrastructure management. The Tangible Capital Asset Ontology was created to represent the physical components that make up infrastructure systems to support the design of messages used to report the inventory and condition of infrastructure assets. A ten-step approach was devised to develop both the ontologies following a layered architecture. As part of the evaluation, both the ontologies were verified and validated.

Within the last decade or so, ontology engineering, in line with the proliferous expansion of the open/linked/semantic web of things, has infiltrated many facets of research and is now clearly ubiquitous even within the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) domain. With specific focus on engineering of ontologies from a legislative perspective, current solutions leave many questions relating to best practice unanswered and provide minimal guidance to how, as engineers, we can accurately develop accurate, standards compliant ontological manifestations of legal documentation. We present our research in the form of a process framework for semi-automated ontology construction using building regulations as an example scenario. This work will appeal to engineers familiar with the preceding technicalities as well as newcomers to ontology engineering who are challenged with alternative manifestations of legal documents within the AEC domain. The objective therefore is to further enable improved uptake and cultural embracement of open government data using the platform provided by linked data paradigm for better communication of AEC regulations.

In construction contractual management, sharing experts’ domain knowledge through ontology is a good way to narrow the knowledge gap between the domain experts and the construction management team. However, little work has been done on ontology taxonomy development in this domain. Based on a literature review on sharing domain knowledge by using expert systems, taxonomy development methods and existing classifications in construction, this study proposes a synthesized methodology for taxonomy development in the domain of construction contract. The main parts of this methodology are building a conceptual model initiated from the definition of the contract, and the adoption of root classes from existing classifications, as well as the iterative development and competency questions approaches. In the case study section, using the research results from several pilot studies, the proposed methodology was applied to the AIA A201 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction (2007) document at the textual level to develop a taxonomy. The resulting taxonomy was used to determine the initial validity of the proposed methodology. The taxonomy development methodology and the developed taxonomy itself are both valuable contributions in the quest to further develop ontology-based applications for sharing domain knowledge about construction contracts. Furthermore, the potential of the taxonomy in ontology-based applications for assisting construction contract and claim management is discussed. In the future when these applications are fully developed, construction project managers can use them to help in their performance of their contract management duties in order to minimize claims and enhance project success.