Text integration based on a construction information resource sharing ontology

In distributed project organisations and collaboration there is a need for integrating unstructured self-contained text information with structured project data. We consider this a process of text integration in which various text technologies can be used to externalise text content and consolidate it into structured information or flexibly interlink it with corresponding information bases. However, the effectiveness of text technologies and the potentials of text integration greatly vary with the type of documents, the project setup and the available background knowledge. To allow for a most flexible combination of text technologies and a most effective use of available project context information a service-oriented architecture for text integration has been proposed that extends Semantic Service Environments with services for document analysis and text content sharing. Backbone of the overall environment is an environment ontology for construction information resource sharing called CORSO. The particular focus of the paper is the design of the CORSO ontology. It first of all revisits the proposed service architecture and its use of text analyses and annotation technologies as well as related engineering models, enterprise and environment ontologies as well as upper ontologies for proposed for information sharing. Based on the reviewed technologies and functions, particular requirements for the ontology to support the envisioned text integration are discussed. Finally, the basic taxonomy of the CORSO ontology is presented.