Ontology Modeling for Construction Safety Knowledge Management

The construction industry is an information-intensive industry and ponderously reliant on documents, including hardcopy, digital documentation, and 3D models. However, most of the valuable information is not fully used because... [ view full abstract ]

The construction industry is an information-intensive industry and ponderously reliant on documents, including hardcopy, digital documentation, and 3D models. However, most of the valuable information is not fully used because of the interoperability problems. Only human can understand the digital documents. In order to exchange and share knowledge between machine and human, a digital document needs to be understandable and process able for machines or systems. Information and knowledge sharing is necessary to solve this interoperability problem. The construction industry put their efforts to utilize the construction information in various ways. This paper developed and validated the three main ontology models for construction safety domain and identifies the potential challenges and obstructions in the ontology development for the construction safety knowledge. A case study of potential hazard from the roof was used to validate the ontology model. By creating ontology database, a domain expert can reuse the dataset when defining the complex relationship between the concept and the entity in the safety domain ontology. The developed safety ontology will be the cornerstone for future ontology projects in the construction safety domain. Also, this study recommends that future researchers should be oriented towards enhancing the information interoperability and creating ontology database in the construction safety domain to improve safety knowledge sharing. Furthermore, to activate ontology database sharing, it is imperative to create a sharing platform.