Ontology-based approach to context representation and reasoning for managing context-sensitive construction information

Construction industry is an information-intensive industry and heavily relies on documents, including physical and virtual documentation and models, to exchange context-sensitive information among different project participants. Many research efforts have been made to help manage construction information; however, few of them considered the context-sensitive nature of the information. In this paper, the authors propose a new approach to facilitate the management of context-sensitive construction information which is stored in different textual documents. The approach addresses the context-sensitive nature of construction information by representing contexts in ontologies and using contexts as indices of the information. The approach also presents a reasoning mechanism that leverages the semantically rich features of ontologies to reason about contexts in order to evaluate their applicabilities. Two case studies were conducted and the results showed the proposed approach can effectively retrieve, classify and manage construction information. Lastly, the authors discuss the limitations of the proposed approach as well as future research directions