An Exploratory Data Analysis of National Bridge Inventory

The National Bridge Inventory (NBI) database is the largest collection of bridge data in the world. This database contains detailed information on more than 600,000 United States highway bridges and large culverts over a period of several decades. The NBI is owned and maintained by the United States Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). There has been very little analysis performed on the NBI from the perspective of data mining and knowledge discovery; therefore, the objectives of this study are to compile and consolidate all available historical NBI data into a data warehouse, and to discover previously unknown patterns, trends and relationships hidden inside the data. The scope of the study includes data integration, summary and descriptive statistics, and knowledge discovery process for temporal and spatial patterns. Advanced analytical methods such as exploratory data analysis and knowledge discovery are utilized as research methodologies for this study. The combination of these methods, coupled with geographic information system (GIS) software, is effective in extracting information from the datasets and representing the visual patterns.