Knowledge Assisted Retrieval of Online Product Information in A/E/C (Architecutre/Engineering/Construciton)

Product cost is a significant expenditure in a construction project where project participants have had to search for and dealt with a large amount of product information. With more product information, industry practitioners can make more informed project decisions. However, current approaches that support A/E/C information acquisition do not provide a comprehensive market scan. While the Internet provides an ever-growing resource for product information, none of the existing approaches is able to make use of this virtual market. Therefore, this research has developed a knowledge-assisted approach to tackle issues related to online searching to help retrieve A/E/C product information from the Internet. The developed approach utilizes (i) domain knowledge represented in the form of a thesaurus, and (ii) a knowledge-supported information retrieval approach adapted from the extended Boolean model. A prototype was implemented with five data sets for research validation. It was concluded from the testing results that domain knowledge can be helpful and the developed approach can effectively increase the number of distinct product manufacturers identified.