Applied ontologies in the knowledge management of construction processes

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.