Applied ontologies in the knowledge management of

Applied ontologies in the knowledge management of construction processes

Marco Masera Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy (email: marco.masera@unifi.it) Chiara Cirinnà Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy (email: chiara.cirinnà@taed.unifi.it) Saverio Mecca Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy (email: saverio.mecca@unifi.it) Valeriano Sandrucci Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy (email: vsand74@hotmail.com) Enrico Vicario Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy (email: vicario@dsi.unifi.it)

Abstract Technological knowledge integration is time consuming, and requires intensive negotiation, and flows aiming at to achieve the design and planning performance in the construction projects. The traditional taxonomic approach of project management through the task decomposition could be usefully extended through an ontological approach to the task description. The ontological analysis allows to produce and experiment knowledge bases to support the communication and the management processes. The identified strategic objective is the development of knowledge bases supported by ontologies to analyse domain knowledge, to make domain assumptions explicit of tacit or informal knowledge, to enable reuse of domain knowledge that is one of the core objectives to which ontology research is addressed. The goal is to reduce the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck in the management process by improving the efficiency of the knowledge exchange in structuring knowledge-bases. The scenario of ontology-editing environments offers a range of achievable general purpose tools. The expected result from the ongoing research will provide an integrated approach to support the knowledge bases elicitation in the construction management oriented to the development and the implementation of a cooperative system of knowledge management.

Keywords: Ontology, Knowledge Base, Construction Management 1. Introduction The knowledge management is related to the complex process of producing and utilising knowledge. Conceptualise, communicate, utilise, re-use, share, manage, extend distributed knowledge, each of these concepts are referred to a complex network of interactions that interest people and machinery, and the processes among them. In order to the processes requirements a fundamental need is observed related to the communication elements that are to be explicit, accessible and cognitively adequate [1]: such kind of requirements characterise mainly the concepts, the tools, and the used vocabulary. To this field the studies on the ontologies are addressed.

1.1 Ontologies in Knowledge Management On a different field of study respect the Ontology intended as a philosophical discipline, the term ontology is used in the field of the knowledge management and the information technologies to describe a theoretical or a computational artefacts [2]. T. R. Gruber defined the ontology as a “specification of a conceptualisation” [3]. The ontology is specified and formalised through specific artefacts representing the meaning assumed in the terms of nature and structure of the related entities. In different terms an ontology represents the attempt to elaborate a conceptual schema that could be exhaustive and rigorous in a specific domain. Generally an ontology is expressed through a hierarchical structure of data containing all the entities that are relevant, their explicit relations, the rules, the axioms, and the constraints specific for the domain [4].

In general and in the field of the ontological study of a technological domain a development of ontologies either foundation either computational is required. A foundation ontology is in general related with the development of basic glossary, nevertheless contrary to a glossary the ontology utilises taxonomic breakdown structures subdivided in levels and the defined elements constitutes the base to describe all the elements of the domain.

A foundation ontology covers the functionality of a basic ontology supporting either the users either the programs, influencing their perspective of data and events, e.g. the foundation ontology are applied to the artificial languages. All the computer programs are based on foundation ontologies that are constitute by the instructions set of the processor, or by the language libraries, the files presents in a file system, or by a other list of “existing stuffs”. Aiming at to build the representation of a knowledge domain afflicted by insufficient basis could be obtained incorrect results. That implies the requirement to develop basic ontologies to be consolidated as foundation of the task.