Bridge management systems (BMSs) are widely used to assist an inspector in performing element-level bridge inspection. Retrieving and determining target elements to be inspected becomes an important factor in the efficiency of bridge inspection. This paper presents an enhanced information retrieval (IR) method based on ontology to predict the target elements. The novelty of this method is that an improved seven-step method based on automatic mapping technology is proposed to construct a new bridge inspection ontology (BIontology), which provides a knowledge base for the present IR method. A further novelty is that a new software architecture is designed for integrating ontology, and a promising prototype system based on the software architecture is developed to realize the present IR method using SPARQL query. In addition, a novel prediction algorithm based on the present IR method is proposed to automatically recommend the target elements. A case study of ontology construction is performed to demonstrate that the improved seven-step method can accelerate the construction of the BIontology compared with the manual method. A case study of bridge inspection is implemented to verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms an existing method, thereby validating the effectiveness of the present IR method.

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To effectively manage the heterogeneous and discrete knowledge of the bridge maintenance domain, this study adopts knowledge graph technology to build a knowledge base of bridge maintenance, called the bridge maintenance knowledge graph (BMKG). The BMKG uses an ontology as the knowledge organization and representation framework and a graph database as the knowledge storage tool. To facilitate the construction of the BMKG, a hybrid method combining a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach is proposed. Firstly, a bridge maintenance domain ontology (BMDO) is coded with Protégé and represented in Web Ontology Language. Secondly, rule reasoning and ontology reasoning are implemented on the BMDO in Protégé in order to automatically complete missing relations or attribute values. Thirdly, ontology reasoning is adopted to perform consistency check on the BMDO. Lastly, the BMDO model is stored in the Neo4j graph database through data format conversion, thus completing the construction of the BMKG. The BMKG is applied in a typical scenario of bridge maintenance to demonstrate its application value. Results show that the proposed hybrid method can create a knowledge graph that can realize the transformation from discrete data into interconnected knowledge. Knowledge graph offers a novel idea to create a knowledge base in the bridge maintenance domain.