Domain Ontology for Processes in Infrastructure and Construction

Abstract

With the increasing demands for domain-wide integrated construction and infrastructure development, there is a need for developing a domain ontology to build a knowledge model that describes the multistakeholder project development process. This paper presents a domain ontology for supporting knowledge-enabled process management and coordination across various stakeholders, disciplines, and projects. The ontological model is composed of concepts, relations, and axioms. Concepts represent the “things” in the domain of interest; relations establish the interconcept links; and axioms specify the definitions of concepts and relations and constraints on their behavior and interpretation. The ontology models the most fundamental concepts in the domain in a structured, extendable, and flexible format to facilitate future evolution and extension of the ontology for representing application-specific and/or enterprise-specific knowledge. The ontology was evaluated through technical evaluation and user evaluation. User evaluation was conducted through one-to-one expert evaluation interviews.