Knowledge Processing for Construction Management Data Base

The objectives of project control systems go beyond documentation to recognition of problems and evaluation of their causes. Through the use of broad information systems, a construction manager today is able to assemble a wide variety of data about his projects or programs. Retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of the meaning of these data, however, usually require the user to have detailed knowledge about the structure and content of the data base and the use of a data retrieval language, and have further programming skills to allow the computer to perform analyses. The work reported in this paper has three goals: to ease retrieval with near-natural language query capabilities; to acquire and accumulate data access and analysis knowledge; and to exercise such knowledge to find patterns in project data. This paper reports on the development of a knowledge-based query system, Expert-MCA, developed by coupling the techniques of data-base management systems, natural language processing, and knowledge-based expert systems for use in the U.S. Army military construction program (MCA). The system architecture is presented, followed by a description of how knowledge is represented and processed in answering English-like queries. Finally, examples are used to explain its capabilities in more detail.