Knowledge management application for the construction industry
The e-CKMI is composed of 4 main components; a user portal/management application, an API request support service, a registered and unregistered Knowledge Management (KM) service and an extractor service. The user portal/management system has a dual role, which enables the user to access specific features, whilst the e-CKMI administrator manages the system ontology and the access rights of the users. Whereas the extractor service consolidates data acquisition, cleansing/transformation and extraction - it is the KM services that perform the knowledge management tasks. These tasks are broken down into nine individual services, namely: an indexer, a profiler, a searcher, a discoverer, a maintenance service, the e-COSer, a disseminator, a wrapper and an external service. The indexer creates indexes so the user can access the same subject at a later date with greater ease. The profiler enables the user to create a unique profile thus ensuring that the user views information that is relevant to their requirements. The searcher enables the user to view a KR (Knowledge Representation), which holds a description of the KI's (individual units of knowledge). The discoverer however, enables the user to search for individual units of knowledge that do not have a KR stored within the e-CKMI. The maintenance service enables the user who submitted the individual units of knowledge to update and refresh it as and when required; however, only the administrator can update and refresh the ontology. But it is the ontology service that provides the practical functions so that the selected ontology is available to other application services. Supporting the creation of workgroups, the disseminator distributes the acquired knowledge (when it is made available) in such a way that only the users of specific workgroups will be notified. The wrapper provides the final compliment in this application by supporting the external services and the e-CKMI, whilst the external services also represent non-vital third party specific services.
