Empirical Research in Subcontractors’ Information Systems and Resource Management Ontologies

SEEK research efforts to extract information from heterogeneous sources requires some knowledge of the range and representation of the information in those sources.  To guide and ground the SEEK extraction efforts, research is underway to document subcontractors’ information systems related to scheduling and resource management. Several firms working on the Rinker Hall project on the University of Florida campus are being studied. The study includes firms’ legacy data systems, documentation and reports, and management processes. This information is being used to develop a base ontology for subcontractor scheduling and resource management as well as an initial classification of the range of information representation in legacy sources. The base ontology defines the scope of information that can be automatically discovered by the SEEK toolkit while documentation of sample information representation provides extraction mechanisms samples to learn from.

The SEEK approach to integrating extended enterprise information differs from the approach of recent academic and commercial work developing data standards such as the Industry Foundations Classes (IFC) and aecXML. A core assumption driving development of SEEK is that the multiple firms composing a project will not subscribe to a common data standard for process related data. The large number of firms in the construction supply chain (easily hundreds and perhaps thousands on large projects) makes it implausible that all firms will uniformly subscribe to a common standard. Thus the SEEK toolkit can augment data standards approaches, extending the range of information available to decision makers.

With a focus on processes, SEEK is not meant to be a replacement for product model data standards. Nor are SEEK and specifications like the IFC mutually exclusive; in a world with multiple protocols for different applications, many different applications and languages can coexist. But SEEK does represent a paradigm shift from a single data model for a single application (and, more broadly, a shift from a single data model for the project). SEEK is designed to operate in a world where there is heterogeneity of data models that store data related to a class of business/decision support problems. SEEK provides abilities to extract and compose the narrow range of data and knowledge related to that class, overcoming the problems imposed by heterogeneity in information representation.