Summary: |
Over the last ten years, the Architecture Engineering and Construction Industry (AEC) came under the growing influence of web based project portals and hereon constitutive software services. At first, research projects utilized the internet as an infrastructure to distribute collaborative environments to dedicated communities (e.g. research, development, application in practice [Kohler 1997]). Soon after, the most promising rudiments found their way into the real world and became - in many ways - supplement to the existing world of desktop- and client server based software structures. As a niche entity, many project portals world wide gained momentum and became every day tools for project collaboration, process support and embedded applications. |