Engaging construction stakeholders with sustainability through a knowledge harvesting platform

With the new regulations and policies related to climate change, the construction industry has been put under pressure to increase the sustainability of its practices. Many organisations are now adapting their practices to meet government legislative targets (e.g. reducing carbon emissions) and consider the environmental, social and economic performance of buildings. In addition, the sustainable construction is also a rapidly changing field, with technological advances, changes in legislation and increasingly educated clients driving the industry to constantly adapt to remain competitive. This represents a key problem for construction professionals as they must continually be aware of new information, best practices, technologies and changing legislation (at a local, national and international level) which are often disseminated from different organisations/individuals through dispersed media. This paper presents a web-based platform solution that provides integrated access to sustainability resources in the form of interactive, dynamic, and user-oriented services that fully exploit latest advances in computing technologies. The platform is an open, scalable and polymorphic context-based solution with modules enabling serendipitous information and knowledge discovery by utilising a symbiosis of technologies such as semantic web, social networking and mobile computing. An initial prototype has been developed, implemented and tested followed by a revised platform which has now been released in a continuing process of incremental development to ensure a fully functional and accepted solution. (c) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.