Domain Ontology for Processes in Infrastructure and Construction

TLDR

The growing demand for integrated construction and infrastructure development necessitates a domain ontology that models the multistakeholder project development process. This paper introduces a domain ontology designed to enable knowledge‑enabled process management and coordination among stakeholders, disciplines, and projects. The ontology is built from concepts, relations, and axioms that define domain entities, link them, and impose constraints, and it was evaluated through technical tests and expert interviews. The resulting ontology captures core domain concepts in a structured, extendable, and flexible format, facilitating future evolution and application‑specific or enterprise‑specific knowledge representation.

Abstract

With the increasing demands for domain-wide integrated construction and infrastructure development, there is a need for developing a domain ontology to build a knowledge model that describes the multistakeholder project development process. This paper presents a domain ontology for supporting knowledge-enabled process management and coordination across various stakeholders, disciplines, and projects. The ontological model is composed of concepts, relations, and axioms. Concepts represent the “things” in the domain of interest; relations establish the interconcept links; and axioms specify the definitions of concepts and relations and constraints on their behavior and interpretation. The ontology models the most fundamental concepts in the domain in a structured, extendable, and flexible format to facilitate future evolution and extension of the ontology for representing application-specific and/or enterprise-specific knowledge. The ontology was evaluated through technical evaluation and user evaluation. User evaluation was conducted through one-to-one expert evaluation interviews.