CONNET Software Center: A Section of the Construction Technology Park Ziga Turk 1 and Tomo Cerovsek 2 Abstract Within the frames of the European Union's Electronic Technology Transfer Network (ETTN), a pan-European virtual technology park - CONNET (CONstruction NETwork) was developed. CONNET consists of several information services for the construction industry. One such service is the Software Center - a comprehensive directory of software and on-line calculators. In the paper we describe the design issues, architecture, robot and agent based data harvesting, and information categorization issues related to that a service. We have found out that the industry lacks a general system for an industry wide indexing of information, but found existing standards in other domains, some of which were found useful. Introduction In the late 1990 a series of initiatives were started by the European Commission, in order to improve the competitiveness of the European industry and its Union-wide integration. One such initiative was the European Technology Transfer Network (ETTN). It set out to create several virtual technology parks aimed at technology transfer, particularly between Europe's small and medium companies (SME). In 1999 partners from the UK, Finland and Slovenia set out to create such a technology park for the construction sector - the construction node of ETTN (Fig. 1). 1 Assoc.Prof., http://itc.fgg.uni-lj.si/~zturk/ CONNET Software Center : a section of the construction technology parkComputing in civil and building engineering / sponsored by the Committee on Coordination Outside ASCE of the Technical Council on Computing and Information Technology of the American Society of Civil Engineers ... [et al.]. - Reston, Va. : American Society of Civil Engineers, cop. 2000. - ISBN 0-7844-0513-1. - Pg. 325-332Ilustr. 2 Ph.D. Candidate, mailto:tcerovse@fagg.uni-lj.si; both: University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, Jamova 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.