SEMANTIC WEB BASED SERVICES FOR INTELLIGENT MOBILE CONSTRUCTION COLLABORATION

Construction project delivery is highly dependent on the effectiveness of the team put together to execute the project. To provide real time, on-demand intelligent mobile collaboration support for their workers, construction enterprises increasingly need to use powerful wireless devices coupled with the availability of improved bandwidth, to tap into different inter and intra-enterprise data resources. This paper focuses on the synergy between the Semantic Web, Web Services and agent technologies in the provision of such mobile collaboration support infrastructure. A multi-tier architecture is presented, which brings together the necessary technology threads, including the Semantic Web (to provide a framework for shared definitions of terms, resources and relationships) , Web Services (to provide dynamic discovery and integration) and multi-agent technologies (to help mobile worker accomplish a particular task) to support intelligent mobile collaboration. Future deployment scenarios are presented to illustrate the potential benefits for the construction industry.