An ontology-driven approach for monitoring collaborative design knowledge

ABSTRACT: Meeting minutes has been confined as recorded summaries corresponding to the discussion content of a progress meeting. The recorded summaries are sometimes used as agenda for the next meeting. The conventional approach implemented to arrange the summaries in tree-structure format results in design rationales and decision intents are implicitly contained as paragraphs of weakly structured plain-text. The conventional meeting minutes are also incapable of integrating pieces of design information effectively. This paper hypothesizes that semantically structured meeting minutes may serve as dynamic medium to record key design information by presenting the design intents explicitly. This paper describes a prototype system that is developed based on semantic web technologies and ontological approach. The prototype supports design pro-gress meeting by generating dynamic records with respect to the content of discussion. 1 INTRODUCTION The building industry has become aware that an er-gonomic fit project information management system is one of the fundamental needs at the project outset so that knowledge corresponds to the activities con-ducted throughout the project life can be managed effectively. The project information management system has evolved from the conventional paper-based mechanism to the nowadays digital based mechanism. However, the implementation of the digital based project information system does not re-spond perfectly to the demands of the building in-dustry yet indicated weaknesses identified from the current web technologies. This paper presents a hy-pothetical knowledge management system supported by the semantic web in which ontological approach is applied for knowledge modeling purposes. The outlines of this paper is divided into two parts where the current practice of project information manage-ment will be analyzed followed by a comprehensive description of the hypothetical system that is to im-prove the pitfalls identified from the current prac-tice. 1.1