Most construction tacit knowledge collected from past projects is not effectively utilized by construction practitioners to keep similar mistakes from recurring. ?Ignorance of acquired knowledge and misunderstanding of accepted knowledge? are two major causes of the reoccurrence of similar construction failures. Historically paper-based documents, illustrated with drawings and photos, have been used to describe lessons learned on construction sites. However, industry practitioners involved in modern construction projects often find it difficult to figure out knowledge of the past by reading paper-based documents. Many construction practitioners strongly agree that if construction failures were documented more effectively, repetitive incidences could be reduced. Humans gain 83% of their knowledge from visual observation. Although text is a more advanced method of expressing abstract knowledge, visual expression facilitates the formation of rich mental models of tacit knowledge. Combining emerging multimedia technologies such as video recordings, voice recognition, location identification, and mobile computing together may help identify an unprecedented way of collecting and disseminating tacit knowledge on construction sites. The objective is to discover if the combination of multimedia technologies could be applied to improving construction tacit knowledge management. The methodology involves identifying 1) available multimedia technologies that could be utilized on construction sites for knowledge acquisition, 2) merits of multimedia recordings in describing lessons learned on construction sites, 3) construction activities that can be described by multimedia recordings, and 4) methods to speed up the process of locating the knowledge needed among numerous multimedia recordings. The project also integrates multimedia recordings with Building Information Models. The intellectual merit of the proposed project relates to discovering the possibility of integrating emerging multimedia technologies and lessons learned on construction sites. The proposed project also provides an opportunity to monitor how younger engineers use multimedia technologies to gain new knowledge. While the proposed project will contribute to scientific understanding, it will also promote broader impacts especially related to teaching construction methods and safety procedures. The multimedia-based knowledge model will provide a semantically rich environment where users can learn lessons gathered from the previous construction projects.
