PhD Project: IT-CODE : IT in COllaborative DEsign

The Building Industry is characterized by its project-oriented nature. A project team is usually formed by multidisciplinary professionals who collaborate based on projectbasis work agreements. The efficiency of the contract-basis collaboration in different project phases, especially in the early design phase, has been a problematic concern of the building sector. In this thesis, significant writings in the ICT (Information & Communication Technology) implementation aspect have been reviewed to provide insight into the scope and depth of research that has been performed in an attempt to fully understand this area.

How designers have handled design information in real-life situations was studied through several case studies in an attempt to answer the formulated research questions. The key step that brought forth the research hypothesis, to improve the designers' practices in more efficient design information handling, was the results of the case studies. The refined hypothesis focused on a higher level of information management improvement, which is defined as total-knowledge-management in the thesis. This documentation practice was thus adapted as the blueprint of a prototype, which was the planned research outcome. The prototype was envisioned to be an alternative tool for the designers to manage design information through managing meeting minutes in a slightly different way from the conventionally used mechanism.

Ontology is the silver bullet of the Semantic Web because it can be used to provide a semantic structure for a resources network that is shared using the World-Wide-Web technology. The advantages of restructuring resources network based on shared conceptualizations represented in ontology were also reviewed. The experience from the prototype development process showed that more effort is required to further improve the currently available ICT, in particular in the human-machine interaction aspect, as suggested in the last section of the thesis.