Mobile and Semantic Web-Based Delivery of Context-Aware Information and Services in Construction - Mobile and Pervasive Computing in Construction - page 13

support have been identified (Lai et al ., 2003). According to Ding et al . (2003) most
of the currently available ICT and knowledge management tools, although designed
to deal with operations of relevance to the knowledge lifecycle of a particular
organization, have several limitations, namely:
* information searching is mainly based on keywords search, which may retrieve
irrelevant information due to term ambiguity and omit important relevant
information when it is stored under different keywords;
* manual efforts such as browsing and reading remain the main methods to
extract relevant information from textual or other representations. The cur-
rently available software agents fail to integrate information from different
sources; and
* maintaining large repositories of weakly structured information remains a
tough and time-consuming task.
Many existingmobile IT applications in use within the construction industry rely
on asynchronous methods of communication (such as downloading field data from
mobile devices onto desktop computers towards end of the shift and then
transferring this information into an integrated project information repository)
with no consideration of user context. Although in some projects the real-time
connectivity needs of mobile workers are being addressed (using wireless tech-
nologies such as 3G/4G, GPRS, Wi-Fi), the focus is on delivering static information
to users such as project plans and documents or access to project extranets.
Similarly, most of the commercially available mobile applications for the con-
struction industry are designed primarily to deliver pre-programmed functionality
without any consideration of the user context. This often leads to a contrast
between what an application can deliver and the actual data and information
requirements of a mobile worker. In contrast to the existing static information
delivery approaches, work in the architecture, engineering and construction/
facilities management (AEC/FM sector), by its very nature, is dynamic. For
instance, due to the unpredictable nature of the activities on construction projects,
construction project plans, drawings, schedules, project plans and budgets often
have to be amended. Also, the context of the mobile workers operating on site is
constantly changing (such as location, current task, construction site situations and
resulting hazards, etc.). In parallel, their information requirements are also
dynamic. Thus, mobile workers require supporting systems that rely on intelligent
methods of human-computer interaction and deliver the right information at the
right time on an “as needed” basis. Such a capability is possible by a better
understanding of the user context.
Another major problem with existing construction processes is that they require
mobile workers to sift through huge amounts of project data to determine the
relevant information. As a result, mobile workers' effectiveness to perform a
particular task very often depends on their ability to remember the relevant
information and documents and their relationships to one another. As tasks
become more complex, the relationships between documents become even
more complex. At the same time, busy project managers are often involved in