Information Technology is advancing at a frightening pace. Cloud computing and its subset, Software as a Service (SaaS), are rapidly challenging traditional thinking for enterprise-level application and infrastructure provision. The project-centric nature of the construction industry provides an environment where the utilisation of SaaS is commercially appropriate, given its ability to provide rapid set-up and predictable costs at the outset. Using project extranets, the construction industry has been - unusually for it as an industry sector - early-adopters of this cloud computing model. However, findings from the research highlight that there is a gap in the information and documents that pass from the construction phase into the operational phase of a building. This research considers examples of the SaaS IT model and how it has been used within a construction and facilities management industry context. A prototype system was developed to address the requirements of facilities management work order logging and tracking process. These requirements were gathered during detailed case studies of organisations within both the construction and facilities management sectors with a view to continue the use of building-specific information through its full life-cycle. The thesis includes a summary of the lessons learnt through system implementation within the construction-contracting organisation Taylor Woodrow, and it concludes with an IT strategy proposal that was developed based on a cloud computing model.

Document clustering automatically organizes a document collection into distinct groups of similar documents on the basis of their contents. Most of existing document clustering techniques deal with monolingual documents (i.e., documents written in one language). However, with the trend of globalization and advances in Internet technology, an organization or individual often generates/acquires and subsequently archives documents in different languages, thus creating the need for multilingual document clustering (MLDC). Motivated by its significance and need, this study designs a Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) based MLDC technique. Our empirical evaluation results show that the proposed LSI-based multilingual document clustering technique achieves satisfactory clustering effectiveness, measured by both cluster recall and cluster precision.

With the advances in information and networking technologies and the proliferation of e-commerce and knowledge management applications, individuals and organizations generate and acquire tremendous amount of online information that is typically available as textual documents. To manage the ever-increasing volume of documents, an individual or organization frequently organizes his/her documents into a set or hierarchy of categories in order to facilitate document management and subsequent information access and browsing. Furthermore, document clustering is an intentional act that reflects individual preferences with regard to the semantic coherency and relevant categorization of documents. Hence, effective document-clustering must consider individual preferences for supporting personalization in document categorization and should be capable of organizing documents into a category hierarchy. However, document-clustering research traditionally has been anchored in analyses of document content. As a consequence, most of existing document-clustering techniques are not tailored to individuals¡¦ preferences and therefore are unable to facilitate personalization. On the other hand, existing document-clustering techniques generally are designed to generate from a document collection a set of document clusters rather than a hierarchy of document clusters. In response, we develop in this study a hierarchical personalized document-clustering (HPEC) technique that takes into account an individual¡¦s folder hierarchy representing the individual¡¦s categorization preferences and produces document-clusters in a hierarchical structure for the target individual. Our empirical evaluation results suggest that the proposed HPEC technique outperformed its benchmark technique (i.e., HAC+P) in cluster recall while maintaining the same level of cluster precision and location discrepancy as its benchmark technique did.

Knowledge is an increasingly important asset for organizational competition, and knowledge management becomes the most important issue for an organization. Building knowledge ontology is a good solution to increase knowledge reusability. Ontology explicitly defines concepts and their relationships, which can facilitate user understanding and further analysis. Based on previous research (Wu, 2006; Chuang, 2006), this research proposes a refined method for the construction of event ontology. The method includes text pre-processing, event ontology construction, and event ontology presentation. The text pre-processing module includes POS tagger, word filter, and term analysis. Based on the concept of sub-event, we can build a 3-level architecture of event ontology that includes sub-events, events, and topics in the event ontology construction module. Event ontology construction module developed in the project provides a friendly editing environment for the user to edit the concepts and attributes of an event that may cover ¡§who,¡¨ ¡§what,¡¨ ¡§where,¡¨ and ¡§what object.¡¨ In the event ontology presentation module, event episode may be illustrated by event frames, flow charts, and Gantt charts. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, a prototype system has been built. The Alexander Poison Event was used as an example to demonstrate the value of the prototype system.

The main goal of Masters final work is to analize basics of virtual organization and its needs for document management system. Virtual organisation is a one of organisations methods to colaborate. Virtual organisation require the system, who will guarantee document managent and control.

The increasing usage of personal computers and Internet in organizations made it possible to create, edit and share various documents between different employees of the organization. However, document management becomes very troublesome, especially if several employees can contribute changes to a singe document: it is very hard to locate latest document version, or determine which changes to the document were made by which employee. Document management systems are aimed to solve these problems. However these systems often are highly specialized and very costly to implement, or they are general-purpose and hard to customize and apply to organization business domain. Inabilities to customize often arise from strict and inflexible metadata model, used in document management system. The aim of this work is propose abstract document metadata definition and processing model, based on XML data definition language and concept of XML data processing pipeline. The proposed model is general-purpose and highly flexible at the same time, enabling to apply model to any business domain and customize it to reflect any features specific to this domain.

Document management systems allow organizations to have greater control over the lifecycle of documents from creation through review, storage, retrieval and dissemination all the way to their destruction. Document management provides greater efficiencies in the ability to classify and reuse information. This document deals with issues of storage and retrieval processes of text documents in document management systems. Main focus is made on choosing an effective document format, means and methods for storing and retrieving documents. The paper suggests using XML as the base document format and relational database management system as backend storage of the document management system. A new modification of the standard Edge method for storing and retrieving XML documents from relational database management systems is introduced and the results of its performance experiment are presented. The experiment proves the performance superiority of the modified Edge method over its standard analogue.

Modem construction projects, characterised by severe fragmentation from both geographical and disciplinary perspectives, require accurate and timely sharing of information. Traditional information management systems operate on a textual basis and do not always consider the meaning of information. Current web-based information management technology supports information communication to a reasonable extent but still has many limitations, such as the lack of semanticawareness and poor interoperability of software applications. This research argues that Semantic Web technologies can enhance the efficiency of information management in construction projects by providing content-based and contextspecific information to project team members, and supporting the interoperation between independent applications. A Semantic Web-based Information Management System (Sams) for construction projects was created to demonstrate the above concept. The approach adopted for this research involved creating a new framework for Semantic Web-based information management. This extensible system framework enables the system to merge diverse construction information sources, ontologies and end-user applications into the overall Semantic Web environment. The semantic components developed in this research included a project document's annotation model, a project partner's user profile model, and several lightweight IFC-based ontologies for documented information management. This supports intelligent information management and interoperation between heterogeneous information sources and applications. The system framework, prototype annotations, and ontologies were applied to a concept demonstrator that illustrated how the project documents were annotated, accessed, converted, categorised, and retrieved on the basis of content and context. The demonstrator (named SwiMS) acts as a middleware, which mediates between user needs and the information sources. Information in project partners' documents were mapped and accessed intelligently. This involved the use of rule-based filtering and thus prevented the users from being overwhelmed by irrelevant documents or missing relevant ones in heterogeneous and distributed information sources. It also enabled the adaptation of documents to individual contexts and preferences, and the dynamic composition of various document management services. Evaluation of the system framework and demonstrator revealed that the system enhances the efficiency of construction information management, with the three most beneficial areas being project knowledge management, collaborative design and communication between project team members. The Swims annotations, ontologies and deductive rules are important technologies provide an innovative approach to managing construction information. These enable the information in construction documents, both structured documents and un-structured documents, to be interpretable by computers. This ensures the efficiency and precision of construction information management.

Thesis(M.S.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (p.70-72).

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:37:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Edson Tafeli Carneiro dos Santos.pdf: 1629281 bytes, checksum: 25ba824aee8619fb40d1e96dad72d38c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-03-12 / Instituto Presbiteriano Mackenzie / The evolution of information and data base management systems, artificial intelligence and neural networks, among other technologies, had contributed to the manipulation of an enormous amount of data and information by computational systems, what resulted in an increase of the information generated after the last half of XX century. The new configuration of the global world and the emerged information age had propitiated a vast amount of available information not ever seen at other times. Thus, information that needs to be accessed can be recovered more efficiently with the help of a specialized computational tool in document management. Also, in a research group, the data manipulated and the scientific and technical information generated by members of this group, promote a mass of information and knowledge that deserves to be managed. This work contemplates the management of documents and information of a determined research group, by means of the adaptation of concepts and pertinent areas taxonomy to the functionalities of an existing electronic document management tool, so that this information can be managed. / A evolução dos sistemas de informação, dos sistemas gerenciadores de banco de dados, da inteligência artificial e das redes neurais, dentre outras tecnologias, contribuíram para que os sistemas computacionais pudessem manipular uma enorme quantidade de dados, e por conseqüência, a geração de informação aumentou após a última metade do século XX. A nova configuração do mundo globalizado e o surgimento da era da informação propiciaram, de uma forma singular e não vivenciada em outras épocas, uma vasta quantidade de informações. Assim, uma informação que necessite ser acessada, pode ser obtida de forma mais eficiente com o auxílio de ferramentas computacionais especializadas em gestão de documentos. Também, em um grupo de pesquisas, os dados que são trabalhados e as informações técnicas geradas, promovem uma massa de informações e conhecimentos que merece ser gerenciada. Dessa forma, neste trabalho, pretende-se adaptar às funcionalidades existentes de uma ferramenta de gerenciamento eletrônico de documentos, por meio de uma taxonomia de conceitos e áreas pertinentes, os documentos e o conhecimento de determinado grupo de pesquisa, para que possam ser gerenciados.