Construction Informatics in European Research: Topics and Agendas

This paper presents past and future research themes in construction informatics as perceived mostly by a community of researchers active in European Information Society projects. It is based on a survey that was conducted in the fall of 2003, mostly among the participants of these projects. The research themes are structured according to a topic map of construction informatics that classifies the R&D themes into core themes and support themes. Core themes create knowledge related either to information processing activities or communication and coordination activities. The support themes address the knowledge transfer process and include identification of research needs, transfer, deployment, and impact of research. It has been found that this research community believes that a breakthrough in the themes related to e-business and e-commerce has been made. Collaboration, integration, and data management were and will continue to be the dominant themes. A growing interest was identified in knowledge-based technologies, including knowledge management, intelligent software, and intelligent interfaces. The research efforts were mostly dedicated to requirements analysis and prototyping. The community realizes that in the future, more attention should be paid to the follow-up commercialized industry deployment and the study of the impact of the developed technologies. It plans to continuously specialize in the construction-specific issues and has only few ambitions to advance state of the art computer science or informatics in general.