The course exercises will form part of a mini-project on how to efficiently collect and make experiences re-usable from the semester 7 building site project.

A major problem today is to efficiently use experiences gathered during a project. Knowledge is stored in persons heads and re-used as these persons are involved in new projects. IT gives us opportunities to create meta knowledge (knowledge about knowledge, who knows what about what?) and also make computer stored knowledge easier accessible. We see everyday examples on mistakes and faults which could have been avoided especially if you are given some hints about where we problems could be expected.

During the harbour front office/dwelling building project the group will capture problems and their solutions. This information shall be captured and stored by means of IT support. A similar project, SERFIN, regarding handling of technical building maintenance information is found at http://it.civil.auc.dk/it/reports/r_serfin2_5_1999.doc. See also the knowledge acquisiton and quality marking process at serfin_process

We call the mini-project MEXIN, management experience on Internet.

MEXIN should be available from an otional website through a conventional HTML browser. The following activites will contribute to the buiding-up of MEXIN

• Listing and structuring of building project and building process concepts which can classify possible knowledge domains such as geometric product model descriptions, documents, design process, construction process, building maintenance process, IT tools, etc. (exercise during the 'Application Information Models' session)
• categorization of actors in the experience capture process
• conceptual layout of a MEXIN functionality
• conceptual layout of information contained in MEXIN
• choose of knowledge representations (in this case given - hypertext)
• continous implementation of a demonstrator

Requirements

• knowledge bank available from WWW
• structured content on experience presentation
• indexed searchable material
• easy to fill in experience (possibly captured in a WWW form and send by email to editor).
• actual problems and their solutions are only treated

Work progress

• make conceptual layout of the system, ADVICE content headings, VOCABULARY main headings.
• fill in ADVICE and extend VOCABULARY
• make a test recording of an ADVICE (possibly attach explaining figure, photo, ..)
• check the design with building site people
• add a indexed seach mechanism

ADVICE layout

• Background
• Advice
• Advice Editor
• Code (Sfb, ....)
• References (to persons, www sites, books, other advices, projects...)
• Date (when advice issued)
• Keywords (possibly fom the vaocabulary)

Vocabulary

• Building part
• Material
• Problem
• Context/environment
• Action (to solve problem, possibly alternatives)
• Actors involved

Group note

Funcionality

• search answer
• add problem + solution
• add problem + ? (no solution)
• feed back
• vocabular ( increase search focus)
  (make with own index page in separate map/directory)
  
  
• users
  end user (language, read, send in tips, feed back)
  admin (change structure, add/change info, maintain, quality assurances on tips)

The MEXIN site will contain a documention covering the following headings (for hints see also http://it.civil.auc.dk/it/education/slides/decision.html). Below some of the points discussed.

• Problem
  • Indentification
  • Description
  
  
  
• Hypothesis for problem solution
  
  
• Solution
  • Why this solution?
  • Functional description
  • Documentation of system and development process
  
  
  
• Future
  Put yourself in different roles (user, developer, ...)
  
  
• Evaluation
  • accessibility
  • adding up-to-date content
  • search possibilities (views)
  • ease of adminitstration
  • transfer of information to other new representations
  • flexible use
  • .......
  
  
  
• Conclusions
  • Further evaluation
  • Possible development (general shell system, relation to other 'Knowledge Nodes', need for (de-facto) standrads development, new business areas,...)
  • Results dissemination