A Visual Transactive Memory System Approach Towards Project Information Management

The Architecture Engineering Construction Facilities Management (AEC/FM) industry is currently plagued with inefficiencies in access and retrieval of relevant information across the various stakeholders and actors, because the vast amount of project related information is not only diverse but the information is also highly fragmented and distributed across different sources and actors. More often than not, even if a good part of the project and task related information may be stored in the distributed information systems, the knowledge of where what is stored, and how that information can be accessed remains a tacit knowledge stored in the minds of the people involved in the project. Consequently, navigating through this distributed and fragmented information in the current practice is heavily reliant on the knowledge and experience of the individual actors in the network, who are able to guide each other to relevant information source, and in the process answering questions such as: who knows what? What information is where? Etc. Thus, to be able to access and effectively use the distributed knowledge and information held by different actors and information systems within a project, each actor needs to know the information access path, which in turn is mediated by other actors and their knowledge of the distribution of the information. In this type of distributed-knowledge network and “actor-focused thinking” when the key actor or actors leave the project, the access path to the relevant knowledge for the associated queries may also disappear, breaking the chain of queries. Therefore, we adopt an “information-focused thinking” where all project actors are considered and represented as computational and information storage entities in a knowledge network, building on the concepts and theories of Transactive Memory Systems (TMS), which primarily deal with effective management and usage of distributed knowledge sources. We further extend the explicit representation of the information entities to visual objects such that the actors can effectively understand, construct and recognize contextual relationships among the information entities through visual management and communication. The merits and challenges of such an approach towards visual transactive memory system for project information management are discussed using a prototype information management platform, VisuaLynk, developed around graph and linked-data concepts, and currently configured for the use phase of a project.