TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR MANAGING STANDARDS-BASED SEMANTIC E-RESOURCES IN THE EUROPEAN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY Celson Lima 1 , Graham Storer 2 , Alain Zarli 1 , and C. Ferreira da Silva 1 ABSTRACT This paper presents the current status of the FUNSIEC project 3 , which is a feasibility project that aims at evaluating the potential use of Semantic Resources 4 (SRs) in e-business matters, through the development of the Open Semantic Infrastructure for the European Construction Sector (OSIECS). This infrastructure is designed within the scope of the FUNSIEC framework. The requirements of OSIECS are identified, the SRs to compose OSIECS are selected, the OSIECS Meta-schema/Schema are created through the application of mapping techniques to the respective Meta-schemas/Schemas of the selected SRs, the conceptual architecture of OSIECS is designed, and the preliminary picture of the OSIECS infrastructure is drawn. This work discusses all these topics. KEY WORDS Semantic resources, ontologies, e-business, open semantic infrastructure. 1. INTRODUCTION The FUNSIEC project touches a dynamic, constantly evolving subject: semantics. For industry generally to be able to communicate precisely, without ambiguity, has been a hugely relevant topic and challenge for two decades and good progress has been made (e.g. STEP- related works). However, the construction industry, whilst being one of the most ancient in the world, has solutions in place only in a minority of areas, including the e-business area. Perhaps the best example of a semantic-related topic tackled successfully in construction is the exchange of building models (ranging from geometrical to facilities management information) using appropriate standards, strongly catalysed by the IAI initiative through the IFC model and the respective software tools (Wix and Liebich 2003). However, some international initiatives produced useful results that have been more fully capitalised, such as: (i) ebXML, which appeared as the horizontal backbone where the 1 Project Coordinator; Team Leader; and Ph. D. student. CSTB, 290 route des lucioles B.P. 209, 06904 Sophia Antipolis cedex, France, celson.lima@cstb.fr , alain.zarli@cstb.fr , ferreira-da-silva@cstb.fr. 2 GSC, 18 Amersham Hill Drive, High Wycombe, HP13 6QY, United Kingdom, graham@storer- consulting.fsnet.co.uk. 3 http://www.funsiec.org. 4 Semantic Resource is an expression coined in the SPICE project which refers all ontology-similar entities, such as taxonomies, dictionaries, thesauri, etc.. Two arguments support this choice: there is no consensus about what an ontology really is and there is a myriad of expressions currently available to define ontologies and similar resources. Copyright ASCE 2005 Construction Research Congress 2005 Construction Research Congress 2005 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by Catarina Ferreira da Silva on 01/17/13. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.