The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (A/E/C) industry is adopting established communications and information technologies to improve collaboration, coordination, and information exchange among the many organizations that participate in all phases of a construction project life cycle. Inter-organizational information systems, are currently used for this purpose. They can be described as a set of interrelated components that collect, retrieve, process, store, and distribute information to support planning, control and decision making between different organizations. In distributed and dynamic construction environments, the ability to exchange and integrate information from different sources and in different data formats becomes crucial to improving the processes supported by these systems. Previous research showed that a major hurdle in integrating A/E/C information in such systems is related to its variety of data types. Since a large percentage of construction information is stored as unstructured text documents, methods for managing this type of data become important for construction information management.
This research focuses on developing methods to integrate unstructured text documents for use in inter-organizational processes, developed by large dynamic distributed virtual organizations in construction project value systems. This investigation is based on available data from internet-based project-oriented inter-organizational information systems developed for the construction industry. In this research, automated processes for retrieval, classification, and integration of unstructured text documents in A/E/C model based systems are explored. Specifically, a combination of techniques from the areas of information retrieval and text mining are analyzed to develop intelligent search engines to identify documents relevant to each component of the project model. Afterwards, an association between relevant documents and project objects will be implemented according to the IFC specification.
