IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM OF UNCERTAINTY DETERMINATION AND COMMUNICATION IN INFRASTRUCTURAL DEVELOPMENT

In civil engineering infrastructural projects many different parties are involved into different phases during the lifetime of a construction; that are consultants, contractors, architects, suppliers of subsurface and surface data, governmental bodies, politicians, the client himself, etc. The communication between these different parties is difficult. This is essentially caused by a lack of quality and uncertainty information concerning collected data and derived real world representations. Particularly in subsurface geotechnical representations, uncertainties are high, since only sparse information is available for the interpretation process. This leads to the introduction of “interpretational uncertainties ” into the representation; that are, uncertainties introduced by the expert while using own knowledge and experience for the data interpretation. To determine possible ways of data quality and uncertainty handling in subsurface representations, interviews with professionals were carried out and companies (engineering / consulting / insurance companies, etc.) visited. Further, a number of Dutch geoportals were checked regarding their provision of quality and uncertainty information. This paper exposes the influence of the expert knowledge on the quality and uncertainty of a subsurface real world representation. It also summarizes the results of visits and interviews as well as the content of the various geoportals visited. Common approaches for the implementation of quality and uncertainty expressions in subsurface real world representations are presented. Finally, an outlook is given on the planned development of methodologies to describe the “interpretational uncertainty ” i