WEB-BASED CONSTRUCTION KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PORTAL

As a knowledge-based economy is emerging, knowledge management (KM) is being rapidly disseminated in both academic circles and the business world. Accordingly, how to effectively manage knowledge is vital to the survival and advance of a company, particularly in project-based industries such as construction. For these reasons, construction companies have adopted IT-based Knowledge management systems (KMS), which is the technology platform and infrastructure that an organization employs to support knowledge management. However, many construction companies have spent resources on developing a KMS that only focus on codification. Furthermore, small and medium-sized companies have limited resources to afford extensive investments. This research addresses the problems found in the current KMS and develops a web-based construction knowledge management portal (CKMP). To achieve these objectives, a case study is conducted and requirements for implementing KM are identified. Based on the identified requirements, this paper builds CKMP using Expert Index (EI), blog, ontology based knowledge retrieval, and wikiblog. The most important functionality of CKMP is their fundamentals to synchronize and support KM process. In order to validate the CKMP, a pilot test with actual users is conducted, and the usability of the system is compared with the current systems. This study is relevant to both the construction industry and academia, as it provides a means of enhancing the performance of KM.