ترویج معاملات برای اطلاعات مربوط به محصول A/E/C

Current approaches that support the transactions of A/E/C product information are not able to handle issues including ambiguous textual product information, domain knowledge utilization, and information comprehensiveness all at one time. Therefore, this researcher has developed a knowledge-supported approach to tackle the recognized issues to obtain an increased amount of product information from the available market, as a way to promote A/E/C product information transactions. Specifically, two strategies including automated query expansion and conceptual indexing that incorporate domain knowledge into Information Retrieval (IR) models were adapted and tested to compare with an existing search engine their capabilities in gathering additional product information. It was concluded from the investigation and testing that existing domain knowledge can be helpful when used adequately with IR operations to promote the transaction of A/E/C product information.

The value of products procured for a construction project usually compiles a large portion of the total project cost. Typically, in the UK, products accounted for 40–45% of the total cost of all construction work [1]. In the US, different ratios have been reported by various cost index publications but in general, costs occurred by products are at a large portion of the total project worth. Because of the high percentage of product costs, project participant have had to search for and deal with a large amount of product information. For example, A/E (Architect/Engineer) designers usually search for existing product information in the design stage of a project in order to refine project specifications. During bid preparation, bidders analyze tender documents and explore the product market for price assessments. After a contractor wins a bid, when a situation occurs that requires a substitution, the contractor often has a great deal of time researching product information in order to identify the or-equal alternatives. This is also true for operation and maintenance, where often a facility manager has to look for replacements when a built product is out-dated or malfunctioning. The need to capture product information occurs repetitively throughout the life cycle of a construction project. By capturing an increased amount of relevant product information from the available market, project participants can improve their understanding of the product market and increase the value of their decisions related to product specification, selection, and procurement applications. One scenario that describes this increase in decision value can be given by the preparation of project specifications. After the design stage, during project construction, A/E designers commonly discover undesired products that should have been excluded as well as better products that should have been included in the specifications. Intuitively, lessons learned can be used to accumulate past experiences and avoid the same mistakes. However, a more proactive approach is to thoroughly explore the product market and acquire as much relevant information as possible before finalizing project specifications. If product information is viewed as one type of merchandise, then we can consider the process of acquiring relevant product information as a transactions between product information seekers such as A/E designers, bidders/contractors, and facility managers, and product information providers such as suppliers or manufacturers. The main interest for this ongoing research is to promote this type of transaction such that an A/E/C information seeker can identify more information providers so as to acquire from them unique product information for comparison. Specifically, the goal is to capture more product information from the available product market, in an efficient and practical manner and with affordable computing equipment. One may argue that it is the information seekers who decide how to leverage the increased amount of product information gathered. However, this research intends to provide the possibilities of obtaining more product information for that the additional information can make positive impacts. That way, not only A/E designers, bidders/contractors, and facility managers will be able to use the additional product information to improve their understanding of the product market during decision making, but suppliers/manufacturers will also be to market their products to a larger consumer base. This paper introduces an investigation on promoting the transactions for A/E/C product information. In Section 2, the challenges the difficulties associated with product information transactions within A/E/C are described. In Section 3, relevant research is reviewed and compared for further investigation. In Section 4, the approach of this research is defined, along with the prototype utilized to test the query expansion and conceptual indexing strategies. In Section 5, prototype results and lessons learned are presented. In Section 6, conclusions from this research are stated.

This paper introduces a knowledge-assisted approach, which was aimed to promote the transactions for A/E/C product information seekers can obtain an increased amount of relevant product information to improve their understanding of the available product market for decision making. Two strategies that incorporate semantic from domain knowledge into information retrieval operations were adapted and tested in the developed approach. With the query expansion strategy, it was shown in our Prototype I that the information retrieval performance varied when different domain knowledge was used for query expansion. Possible parameters that affected the retrieval performance were the selection of domain concepts for utilization and the lexical representation of the selected concepts. With the conceptual indexing strategy, the testing in Prototype II consistently showed improved performance, which suggests that the semantic networks embedded in existing ontology can be useful in supporting the retrieval of A/E/C product information. Nevertheless, both prototype experiments advised the necessity to modify existing domain ontology for improving the retrieval performance. Although the developed approach was only tested in the scope of searching for A/E/C product information, its fundamental premise can be applied to support other searching needs that deal with textual information within a specific domain. Future steps of this research include (1) the introduction of a more robust ontology construction method to represent domain knowledge, (2) the enhancement of the underlying ranking mechanisms tested in the developed approach, and (3) the comparison of the developed approach with other existing third-party intermediaries using multiple data sets.