Creating Knowledge from Construction Documents Using Text Mining

A number of documents containing important and useful knowledge have been generated over time in the construction industry. Such text-based knowledge plays an important role in the construction industry for decision-making and business strategy development by being used as best practice for upcoming projects, delivering lessons learned for better risk management and project control. Thus, practical and usable knowledge creation from construction documents is necessary to improve business efficiency. This study proposes a knowledge creating system from construction documents using text mining and the design comprises three main steps - text mining preprocessing, weight calculation of each term, and visualization. A system prototype was developed as a pilot study of the system design. This study is significant because it validates a knowledge creating system design based on text mining and visualization functionality through the developed system prototype. Automated visualization was found to significantly reduce unnecessary time consumption and energy for processing existing data and reading a range of documents to get to their core, and helped the system to provide an insight into the construction industry.