- See www.zturk.comedit
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The engineers of the industrial age created the transportation, water, power and other grids that provide the infrastructure of the civilized world. On the internet a new kind of grids are being set up ones that are pulling together... more
The engineers of the industrial age created the transportation, water, power and other grids that provide the infrastructure of the civilized world. On the internet a new kind of grids are being set up ones that are pulling together computing and communication resources to provide infrastructure for the digital economy. Civil engineers too can make use of this new paradigm of computing, not only to crunch through complex simulations but to use it as a collaboration platform for their virtual enterprise (VO) that is involved in the design, construction and management of products. This paper introduces the concept of grid computing, identifies the role grids could play in engineering processes, presents a high level architecture for grids based engineering services and tools, reviews it and defines the research and development issues. It is based on the results of an on-going European Union project InteliGrid Interoperability of Virtual Organizations on a Complex Semantic Grid.
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Internet is increasingly important for our economies and societies. This is the reason for a growing interest in internet regulation. The stakes in network neutrality - that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally - are... more
Internet is increasingly important for our economies and societies. This is the reason for a growing interest in internet regulation. The stakes in network neutrality - that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally - are particularly high. This paper argues that technological, civil-libertarian, legal and economic arguments exist both for- and against net neutrality and that the decision is ultimately political. We therefore frame the issue of net neutrality as an issue of political economy. The main political economy arguments for net neutrality are that a net-neutral internet contributes to the reduction of inequality, preserves its openness and prevents artificial scarcity. With these arguments Slovenia, after Chile and the Netherlands, adopted net neutrality legislation. We present it as a case study for examining how political forces are affecting the choice of economic and technological policies. After a few years we are finding that proper enforcement is just as important as legislation.
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The world is going through some profound changes: automation and general improvement of productivity is resulting in the abundance of industrial products, the domination of the West in global economy and politics is challenged by the rise... more
The world is going through some profound changes: automation and general improvement of productivity is resulting in the abundance of industrial products, the domination of the West in global economy and politics is challenged by the rise of the BRICS economies, climate change is requiring a reconsideration of the energy system, particularly in Europe demographic changes are resulting in an ageing society, and finally, the electronic communication revolution is changing the ways in which elements in a society are held together influencing all aspects of economy, research, learning, living, media etc. Civil engineers and their forerunners have been shaping the infrastructure of societies for millennia. This paper explores how the listed trends will affect the civil engineering work and where civil engineers will be able to contribute. While the relative contribution of the construction industry to the jobs creation and economic growth will continue to decline, there are substantial opportunities in comparison with some other engineering industries, in particular in the area of climate change and globalization. There are some lessons; in particular with earthquake engineering – the notion of resilience – then can be borrowed by economics and finance.
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Abstract. In the global economy an increasingly popular concept of or-ganization is that of a collaborative enterprise. An essential ingredient of such an enterprise is the information technology infrastructure that en-able the... more
Abstract. In the global economy an increasingly popular concept of or-ganization is that of a collaborative enterprise. An essential ingredient of such an enterprise is the information technology infrastructure that en-able the coordination and the sharing of information and other ...
Research Interests: Computer Science, Grid Computing, Enterprise Architecture, European Union, Interoperability, and 10 moreCollaborative Engineering, Research and Development, Virtual Organization, High performance, Grid, Global Economy, Enterprise Information System, Semantic Grid, Enterprise Systems Engineering, and Enterprise integration
Construction is trailing other industries in the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT). A major European project Digiplace is investigating if this problem could be addressed using digital platform technology. In the... more
Construction is trailing other industries in the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT). A major European project Digiplace is investigating if this problem could be addressed using digital platform technology. In the context of this project the current state, future goals and barriers in between have been researched through literature studies, surveys, and interviews. Several similar studies have been done in the pasthowever, the barriers are still there. The paper, therefore, introduces a novel framework to study technology transfer. It identifies three key vectors of transfer: standards and regulation, software, and people. Along these vectors, it identifies elements that pull and elements that push technology, but which need to overcome the various frictions and barriers. These are then structured according to the PESTEL approach. This approach encourages the holistic study of factors beyond technology. The paper concludes that there is a need for a better way of deployment, organizing, marketing, and learning about new technologies which would mostly benefit small and medium enterprises which lag most in the use of ICT. This could be implemented in the form of industrial digital platforms as a part of the Industry 4.0 strategy
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This paper proposes a definition, scope and topics of construction informaticsa discipline also known as 'construction IT' or 'communication and information technologies in construction'. It presents... more
This paper proposes a definition, scope and topics of construction informaticsa discipline also known as 'construction IT' or 'communication and information technologies in construction'. It presents its ontology that, together with methodology, epistemology and axiology, ...
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This paper presents past and future research themes in construction informatics as perceived mostly by a community of researchers active in European Information Society projects. It is based on a survey that was conducted in the fall of... more
This paper presents past and future research themes in construction informatics as perceived mostly by a community of researchers active in European Information Society projects. It is based on a survey that was conducted in the fall of 2003, mostly among the participants of these ...
Research Interests: Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Informatics, and 11 moreKnowledge Management, Project Management, Construction Management, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, Knowledge Transfer, Construction Industry, Business Informatics, Trend Analysis, Application, and Software Deployment
Research Interests: Physics and Humanities
This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, May 20-22, 2015, organized by the Institute for Systems and... more
This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, May 20-22, 2015, organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), and technically sponsored by the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The purpose of the WEBIST series of conferences is to bring together researches, engineers and practitioners interested in technological advances and business applications of web-based information systems. The 17 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected originally 115 paper submissions. They were organized in topical sections names: web interfaces and applications; internet technology; society, e-business and e-government; web intelligence; and mobile information systems.
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In navigating the currently troubled waters of inflation and the rising cost of living, politicians are tempted to treat the symptoms—offsetting the increasing expenses with subsidies and expanding welfare programmes. But one should also... more
In navigating the currently troubled waters of inflation and the rising cost of living, politicians are tempted to treat the symptoms—offsetting the increasing expenses with subsidies and expanding welfare programmes. But one should also treat the cause. The cause is not Russian aggression towards Ukraine. That is also a symptom—a symptom of the weakness of Europe and the West, either real or perceived. This weakness should be addressed. In 2022 power politics made a comeback. It has become clear that a world in which prosperity is spread by innovation and trade is not a given but has to be protected by real power. In 2022, with war once again on European soil, the EU woke up to a world it thought only existed in the history books—where power rests on the pillars of demography, energy security, food security and military strength. To maintain its borders, its prosperity and its prestige in the world, the EU will need to be stronger. It will have to work harder, work smarter, improve...
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Presentation held at the conference "Dalle pubblicazioni ai dati: l'apertura della scienza tra promesse e fatti". 7-8 November 2019, Udine
Technology roadmapping is a needs-driven technology planning process to help identify, select, and develop technology alternatives to satisfy a set of (product) needs. It can provide a framework to help plan and coordinate technology... more
Technology roadmapping is a needs-driven technology planning process to help identify, select, and develop technology alternatives to satisfy a set of (product) needs. It can provide a framework to help plan and coordinate technology developments both within a company or an entire industry. Semantic Grid-a grid where its components are semantically annotated-is a technology that addresses a set of needs of others. It is therefore more of a technology alternative-a road-in some other roadmap, than a need in itself. Semantic grid can potentially play a significant role in roadmaps related to e-science, collaboratories, digital libraries, virtual organizations, collaborative enterprises etc. For example, one can easily envision it to play a role in the following collaborative enterprise vision 2 : "The vision is to achieve a seamless collaborative enterprise which is a networked organisation, dynamically formed to create sustainable value through the delivery of integrated Product...
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Abstract Industrial parks, science parks, university campuses, tourist complexes are springing up greatly in developing countries. Decision-making on equipment maintenance of these areas where facilities intensively locate differs from... more
Abstract Industrial parks, science parks, university campuses, tourist complexes are springing up greatly in developing countries. Decision-making on equipment maintenance of these areas where facilities intensively locate differs from that of industrial systems or plants in two features: 1) it needs regular repetition and update because equipment replacements, facility renovations and equipment condition changes often happen during the operation phase, 2) the accumulated maintenance data in these areas are large enough to be used for decision-making. However, existing approaches to decision-making on equipment maintenance have not considered such features. To fill this gap, this research aims to propose a data-driven approach for decision-making on equipment maintenance by integrating three technologies: Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS). By implementing quantitative decision-making models and Monte-Carlo simulation, a data-driven RCM process is proposed. BIM and GIS are integrated to support the acquisition and update of data required for the proposed RCM process. Based on requirement analysis and architecture design, a prototype system is developed and verified by using a virtual campus. The results show that the proposed approach reduces labor cost and diminishes difficulties of decision-making on equipment maintenance. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge in that it provides an objective approach for the decision-making on equipment maintenance. For future improvements, the approach is compatible with the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to support more efficient data acquisition as a basis for decision-making on maintenance.
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The default storage system for the World Wide Web is the file system-the concept of a database is not built into the core of the HTTP protocols or into the HTML language. But the bulk of information served off web servers is of similar... more
The default storage system for the World Wide Web is the file system-the concept of a database is not built into the core of the HTTP protocols or into the HTML language. But the bulk of information served off web servers is of similar structure and ideally it should be served in conjunction with a database. The typical approach is to use some method of dynamic page generation on top of a traditional relational database system and using the three-tier architecture. This is done by professional web publishers. However, technical expertise required prevents the majority of authors to use a database approach. And if information is not structured in a database the potentials of using it in the semantic/services web is limited. In this paper we describe a tool we have been developing and using since 1995 that provides a low entry level into database powered web applications and services. It is an application generator and is optimized for rapid development of small to medium sized Web applications. Based on a compact object-oriented definition both the user interface and web services compatible API is generated. Recenly, Web services interface has been added. The result is a tool that significantly simplifies the provision of Web services and allows the masses to become not only publishers but service providers.
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Product and process models are often regarded as a panacea to most problems of computer integrated construction (CIC). But the paradigm shift they are about to achieve is not imminent. Software supporting CIC relies on the definition of... more
Product and process models are often regarded as a panacea to most problems of computer integrated construction (CIC). But the paradigm shift they are about to achieve is not imminent. Software supporting CIC relies on the definition of the conceptual building product and building process models which are, at least in a standardised form, delivered quite slowly. Alternatively, working solutions to CIC may also be achieved by reducing the level of detail at which the information are modelled. This paper suggests a document to be used as a larger data chunk instead of records, attributes and primitive objects. Resulting construction document management (CDM) systems are a shorter term solution for CIC; the documents are not as numerous as objects or attributes and they hide complexity of the information they carry. During the life cycle of a building the information creation, demand and use are greatest in the pre-construction phases, particularly the design phase. The paper presents a prototype of a construction design documentation management system (CDDMS), particularly the conceptual model behind it (the "CDDMS" model) and the extensions it needs to span into other dimensions of the product model definition space. It has been found out that the existing database and networking technology is sufficient to create efficient collaborative engineering environments. The presented schema is compatible with the proposed "HCDMS" model for hybrid environments where some documents are results of queries into a product model database and some are the original containers of information.
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In integrated CAD different techniques are used to model variousaspects of the problem domain - information, activities, data and dataflow. Finally all models developed using different techniques must atleast co-operate which is not... more
In integrated CAD different techniques are used to model variousaspects of the problem domain - information, activities, data and dataflow. Finally all models developed using different techniques must atleast co-operate which is not encouraged by different modelling techniques. We propose a modelling approach borrowed from object oriented software design introduced by Booch that offers methods and notations for both the static and the dynamic aspects of state and behaviour of the models and offers smoother implementations with object oriented languages and databases. The paper discusses the motives, the details of the proposed 00 modelling approach and an example from the domain of standards representation.
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... SimiLar solu-tion spaces tbr architectural have also been proposed by Coyne [13], and consist of generative and in-terpretive design space. ... To hammer a nail, he argues, we do not require conscious reflective knowledge about the... more
... SimiLar solu-tion spaces tbr architectural have also been proposed by Coyne [13], and consist of generative and in-terpretive design space. ... To hammer a nail, he argues, we do not require conscious reflective knowledge about the physical proper-ties of a hammer and the ...
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Product and process models are often regarded as a panacea to most problems of computer integrated construction (CIC). But the paradigm shift they are about to achieve is not imminent. Software supporting CIC relays on the definition of... more
Product and process models are often regarded as a panacea to most problems of computer integrated construction (CIC). But the paradigm shift they are about to achieve is not imminent. Software supporting CIC relays on the definition of the conceptual building product and building process models which are, at least in a standardized form, delivered quite slowly. Working solutions to CIC may also be achieved by reducing the level of detail at which information are observed. The larger data chunk to an object or an attribute is a document which may contain (or refer to) many objects. Construction document management (CDM) systems are a shorter term solution for CIC; documents are not as numerous and they hide complexity of the information they carry. In the life cycle of a building the information creation, demand and use are greatest in the pre-construction phases. The paper presents a prototype of a construction design documentation management system (CDDMS), particularly the conceptual model behind it (the "CDDMS" model) and the extensions it needs to span into other dimensions of the product model definition space. It has been found out that the existing database and networking technology is sufficient to create efficient collaborative engineering environments. The presented schema is compatible with the proposed "HCDMS" model for hybrid environments where some documents are results of queries into a product model database and some original containers of information.
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Excitement about possibilities of artificial intelligence has been shared in engineering professions as well. It has been predicted that because engineering designs (unlike architectural) are subject to "objective" evaluation,... more
Excitement about possibilities of artificial intelligence has been shared in engineering professions as well. It has been predicted that because engineering designs (unlike architectural) are subject to "objective" evaluation, they could just as well be made by intelligent computer software. In this paper, the author claims that this is wrong. The optimistic predictions are founded on the beliefs that the strong AI and cognitive science community take for granted - that mentally engineers deal with models of objective reality, that together with others engineers they take part in various processes which result in building products, and that one of such processes is design which is in fact problem solving where a best solution is selected from a set of possible ones; and that these processes could be reproduced mechanically. There has been quite a lot of criticism of the strong AI approaches, particularly after extensive research in AI did not live up to its promise. The au...
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Analysis and design needed for the development of engineering information technology (IT) solutions are inherently much more complex than comparative efforts in the scope of commercial applications. A semantic representation of conceptual... more
Analysis and design needed for the development of engineering information technology (IT) solutions are inherently much more complex than comparative efforts in the scope of commercial applications. A semantic representation of conceptual model schema and other information is required. In the paper, logic programming is suggested for the internal representation of thesauri data and conceptual models. Logic programming specialises in setting the rules which define relations between objects; which is exactly the case in conceptual modelling. Prolog is a logic programming language and was successfully extended in this research to provide for the representation of data and logic of thesauri and conceptual models. Key Words conceptual modelling, Prolog, engineering database design, thesauri, NIAM, CAD.
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Works that have been dealing with the use of infor-mation technology in the educational process are numerous. They deal with how one could use this or the other technology to teach engineering topics more efficiently. A couple of journals... more
Works that have been dealing with the use of infor-mation technology in the educational process are numerous. They deal with how one could use this or the other technology to teach engineering topics more efficiently. A couple of journals and confer-ence tracks deal exclusively with ...
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All engineering disciplines are examining information technologies (IT) to improve the product's qual- ity, to design and manufacture at a lower cost, and to shorten the time from inception to a finished product. Fundamentals of... more
All engineering disciplines are examining information technologies (IT) to improve the product's qual- ity, to design and manufacture at a lower cost, and to shorten the time from inception to a finished product. Fundamentals of these technologies have been invented by computer sciences. The applica- tion to engineering disciplines, such as civil or mechanical engineering has become a research topic within those disciplines. In the paper a framework is proposed, which analyses an abstract engineer- ing process, identifies the information requirements, defines and positions the technologies, which can be applied. A combination of two information processes and their relations are studied. The paper shows that this suffices to introduce all information technologies, including integrated and concurrent engineering. We will argue that information processes in engineering should be treated integrally and that in order to achieve synergetic effects, all should be studied at the same time. An Esprit project ToCEE is an ex- ample of such an approach.
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Abstract:Within the context of the construction industry Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems offer the means for rapidly achieving a shallow level of integration by providing process integration and information management on a... more
Abstract:Within the context of the construction industry Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems offer the means for rapidly achieving a shallow level of integration by providing process integration and information management on a coarse, document sized level of ...
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The SciX (Open, self organising repository for scientific information exchange) project is funded by the European Commission in order to demonstrate the feasibility of new alternative models of scientific publishing made possible by the... more
The SciX (Open, self organising repository for scientific information exchange) project is funded by the European Commission in order to demonstrate the feasibility of new alternative models of scientific publishing made possible by the Internet. The project builds upon the previous experience of some of the partners in running an electronic peer reviewed journal and in setting up an e-prints archive. The project includes both theoretical work in making a formal model of the scientific publishing process, to be used as a basis for studying the life-cycle costs of alternative business models, and a demonstrator of a functioning e-prints archive.
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This paper deals with the CUMINCAD-repository (Cumulative Index on CAD), which was set up in 1998 and has served the CAAD-community since then as an important source of archived domain related information. CUMINCAD contains over 5,000... more
This paper deals with the CUMINCAD-repository (Cumulative Index on CAD), which was set up in 1998 and has served the CAAD-community since then as an important source of archived domain related information. CUMINCAD contains over 5,000 entries in the form of publications in the field of Computer Aided Architectural Design. The number has been growing steadily over the years. To date only advanced search mechanisms have been provided to access these works. This may work out well for a just-in-time location of a reference but, is inadequate for just in case browsing through the history of CAAD. For such applications, a hierarchical browsing interface, like one in Yahoo or DMOZ.org is envisioned. This paper describes how the keyword categories were defined and how a moderate, distributed effort in defining the categories will allow machine-identified classification of the entire data set. The aim of the paper is to contribute to building up a wide spread consensus on what the appropriate keyword categories in CAAD are, and what sub-topics should sit below the main keyword categories.
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To researchers in every discipline, Internet is quickly becoming the dominating environment to do literature studies. Commercial bibliographic databases tend to be too general, are not up-to-date and require special skills and effort to... more
To researchers in every discipline, Internet is quickly becoming the dominating environment to do literature studies. Commercial bibliographic databases tend to be too general, are not up-to-date and require special skills and effort to be searched. On the other hand researchers also publish on the Web and collaboratively that can create indexes of relevant publications. CUMINCAD is a bibliographic index that compiles papers related to computer aided architectural design. Implemented with a database, it allows searching and browsing in the ways usual on the Web. It provides a “historical evolution” to learn from previous efforts and draws attention to older original works that could have been ignored because they could not be found on the Web otherwise. The authors believe that CUMINCAD will help focus future CAAD research and improve the education. CUMINCAD work started in 1998 and is available at www.fagg.uni-lj.si/cumincad/. This paper focusses on the design and development of the database and presents some ideas concerning its advanced use in the analysis of research efforts.