Digital library of construction informatics and information technology in civil engineering and construction
Digital library
Paper: w78-2000-86
| Paper title: | Intelligent broker for collaborative search and retrieval of construction information on the WWW |
| Authors: | Bakis N, Sun M |
| Summary: | "CONTEXT In recent years, the construction industry began to use the World Wide Web (WWW) as an information dissemination vehicle. The amount of construction information available on the WWW is increasing exponentially, ranging from product data to technical publications, from building regulations to best practice guides. However, the task of finding the right information becomes more and more difficult. At present, users rely on two types of solutions to the information discovery and retrieval problem on the Internet, “yellow pages like information gateways” and “robot-based Internet search engines”. While acknowledging the success for both solutions so far, the authors will discuss their growing evident limitations in supporting construction specific information retrieval on the WWW. OBJECTIVES AND METHODOLOGY The aim of this study is to develop an intelligent information broker for the construction information on the Internet, which will facilitate collaboration between users for the benefit of improved information search and retrieval on the WWW network. The objectives are: ·to examine the information needs of different types of users in the construction industry; ·to capture these information needs conceptually as user profiles and information context models; ·to incorporate construction domain knowledge into the information network; ·to improve speed and accuracy of users search for construction information by developing a information network that facilitates the sharing of search results and knowledge; ·to develop a hierarchical distributed client/server architecture to enable the most efficient service both Intranet and Internet users. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS The intelligent information broker described in paper has a client/server architecture based on software agents technology. It has two distinct features: (1) supporting user collaboration; (2) applying construction domain and user profile knowledge to improve the information search. Collaborative Information Searching Collaborative searching or social filtering is often the most effective method of ranking Internet documents. The developed information broker enables users with the same interest to share the results of their search and their rating of each document’s quality and relevance. Construction knowledge and User Profile The information broker server is in essence a construction oriented WWW searching engine. What distinguishes it from other searching engines is its evolving knowledge base of construction specific keyword sets and construction user profiles. Using the knowledge base, the information broker server is able to answer intelligent queries other than simple keyword matching." |
| Type: | |
| Year of publication: | 2000 |
| Series: | w78:2000 |
| ISSN: | 2706-6568 |
| Download paper: | /pdfs/w78-2000-86.content.pdf |
| Citation: | Bakis N, Sun M (2000). Intelligent broker for collaborative search and retrieval of construction information on the WWW. Construction Information Technology 2000. Taking the construction industry into the 21st century.; ISBN 9979-9174-3-1; Reykjavik, Iceland, June 28 - 30, 2000 (ISSN: 2706-6568), http://itc.scix.net/paper/w78-2000-86 |
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