Improving Collaboration in the Construction Industry through Context-Aware Web Services

Collaboration technologies have been increasingly used for supporting the requirements of a multi-disciplinary construction project team in recent years. In particular, web services technology has been leveraged in the construction industry for distributed communication and information management through message exchanges. However, the current standardized web services are unsuitable for typical construction information, which is large in magnitude and diverse in scope. This paper presents our proposed context aware web service framework that uses standardized ontologies to facilitate efficient and faster exchange of construction information in real time. This paper also presents an example scenario illustrating the collaborative environment facilitated with the proposed web service framework.