Robust Mediation of Construction Supply Chain Information

We describe the architecture of a robust and flexible mediation and wrapping infrastructure to support access to and sharing of semantically heterogeneous process information in the construction supply chain. This infrastructure allows us to collect and share process related information from numerous legacy systems, each with its own interface and schema (that may or may not subscribe to data standards). Our research extends current capabilities to allow automated mediation across a large number of sources and with a high degree of semantic heterogeneity. In particular, we extend the query processing capabilities of the mediator to make use of domain knowledge provided by experts and domain knowledge in the information sources accessed. Accomplishing this requires formalization of knowledge about the representation and use of information by construction subcontractors and suppliers, and development of theory about knowledge transformation in construction. Our mediation approach extends existing integration theories and is a novel complement to existing efforts in data standardization, embracing the heterogeneity of information representation in the supply chain.