An Architecture to Support Semantic Enrichment of Knowledge Sources in Collaborative Engineering Projects

This work brings a contribution focused on collaborative engineering projects where knowledge plays a key role in the process, aiming to support collaborative work carried out by project teams, through an ontology-based platform and a set of knowledge-enabled services. We introduce the conceptual approach, the technical architectural (and its respective implementation) supporting a modular set of semantic services based on individual collaboration in a project-based environment (for Building & Construction sector). The approach presented here enables the semantic enrichment of knowledge sources, based on project context. The main elements defined by the architecture are an ontology (to encapsulate human knowledge), a set of web services to support the management of the ontology and adequate handling of knowledge providing search/indexing capabilities (through statistical/semantically calculus), providing a systematic procedure for formally documenting and updating organizational knowledge. Results achieved so far and future goals pursued here are also presented.