Taxonomy for Outside Plant Construction in Telecommunication Infrastructure: Supporting Knowledge-Based Virtual Teaming

With the expected volume of rehabilitation work in telecommunication infrastructures, there is a need to establish a means of supporting the exchange of project information in a semantic way. Semantic Web techniques provide superb tools for the exchange of relevant project information. It also supports the creation of more advanced supply chains and the establishment of proper knowledge management tools. This paper presents a taxonomy for outside plant construction. It includes a description of related processes, actors, products, resources, and technical concepts. The taxonomy was developed as an extension of the e-COGNOS taxonomy, and was validated through interviews with industry experts. Relevant terms from inside plant construction were also included in the taxonomy. This paper also presents an outline for the future use of the proposed taxonomy, that of supporting corporate memory initiatives—including a prototypical implementation of the formation of virtual teams.