Retrieval of Project Knowledge from Heterogeneous AEC Documents

A knowledge system for the retrieval of project knowledge from civil-engineering documents will be described from different views. The views demonstrate the research process, the knowledge acquisition process and the recovery structure of the knowledge system. The described knowledge system should provide the possibility to reuse construction knowledge locked in documents. The documents will be classified using text analysing methods combined with clustering techniques. A lexicon which includes important parts of knowledge like construction key words, synonyms etc. for the specific domain of the building process will be combined with a document class structure and project class structure. During the process of general text analyses the lexicon will be completed with the frequency of words structured in different clusters of the building process. The knowledge system built up, will be a long-term storage of project experiences for the building industry.