Knowledge Processing for Construction Management Data Base

Abstract

The objectives of project control systems go beyond documentation to recognition of problems and evaluation of their causes. Through the use of broad information systems, a construction manager today is able to assemble a wide variety of data about his projects or programs. Retrieval, analysis and interpretation of the meaning of these data, however, usually requires the user to have detailed knowledge about the structure and content of the database, use of a data retrieval language, and have further programming skills to have the computer perform analyses.The work reported in this thesis has three goals: to ease retrieval with near-natural language query capabilities, to acquire and accumulate user defined knowedge, and to exercise such knowledge for translation from English terms to database fields or their values, access to database or other information sources, or pre-access and post-access processing. A knowledge based query system, called Expert-MCA, has been developed by coupling the techniques of natural language processing, knowledge-based expert systems, and database management systems. The system architecture will be presented, followed by a description of how knowledge is represented and processed in answering English-like queries. An object-oriented formalism is applied to represent knowledge required in the process of reasoning. Expert-MCA's reasoning capability has been extended by using context driven reasoning, a generalization of reasoning mechanisms used in framed-based systems.

Exploring Natural Language Processing in Construction and Integration with Building Information Modeling: A Scientometric Analysis

“…In the wake of the statistical revolution, NLP statistical systems, which were cheaper and more flexible than the previous rule-based systems [33], were developed and tested in industry during the decade. The authors Logcher et al aimed to design a data-base query system to help construction managers retrieve useful information to support the decision making process [64]. In their system architecture, the authors proposed a language analyzer (or natural language processor) to facilitate information retrieval and access by allowing the user to query the database in near-natural language.…”

Expert systems in construction engineering and management: state of the art

“…In manipulating any query, the system not only considers the data in the database, but also considers information about the user-including rules and responsibilities-and the MCA domain. Expert-MCA is an operational prototype expert system (Logcher et al, 1989).…”