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ABE Services has developed a web based application, the Compliance Data Management Service (CDMS) for checking work performed on site as part of building and construction projects. These are projects undertaken by the building, construction and related industries.

The diagram below gives an overview of how CDMS works.

The three main parts of CDMS are:

• Designing Projects by identifying the tasks to be performed and allocating those tasks to the people who will perform them.
• Using a mobile phone on site to check that completed tasks comply with industry standards and best practice
• Monitoring and Managing the project via the progress and status of the completed tasks, the tasks outstanding and the non-compliant tasks.

Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs) are central to the three main parts of CDMS.

An Inspection and Test Plan (ITP) identifies the inspection, testing (verification) and acceptance requirements of a particular type of task, eg brickwork. Conceptually an ITP could be thought of as a refined checklist, identifying the usual steps to be followed when undertaking a particular type of task. A specific task may also have additional requirements specific just to it.

An Inspection and Test Plan is composed of one or more:

• Verification Point(s) which identify the parts of the task to verify. Each Verification Point is composed of one or more:

• Criterion (plural Criteria) which define the specific requirements by which a verification point can be deemed compliant. This could include referencing specific industry standards which the task is required to comply with.

A set of commonly recurring Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs) has been identified and published on the ABE Services web site. To help promote a higher standard of work in the building and construction industries ABE Services decided to make these common Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs) freely and publicly available. Currently though the details of these common Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs) are hidden within the CDMS application. To place them in the public domain an OWL ontology, named the Common Inspection and Test Plans ontology, is being constructed based on this initial set of commonly recurring Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs).

The definition of ontology in this context is along the lines of “an ontology is a specification of a conceptualization“. In this case the specification is that which constitutes a generic Inspection and Test Plan and the more specialized Inspection and Test Plans listed in the set of common Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs). Other related definitions of ontology include the more philosophical “the study of the nature of being” and the more detailed Wikipedia definitions Ontology and Ontology (Information Science)

The Common Inspection and Test Plans ontology is being implemented using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is an ontology language that can formally describe the meaning of terminology used in Semantic Web documents (See Why OWL?). In turn the Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

In the world of building and construction projects, and activities related to Real Estate, the buying and selling of houses, house and building maintenance, and potentially in the selection of contractors to perform building work, the Common Inspection and Test Plans ontology will form one of these databases, connected by the concept of how to perform a specific type of building, construction or related task.

In the first instance the Common Inspection and Test Plans ontology has been published in a very simple draft form, listing only the Inspection and Test Plans and not the more detailed the Verification Points and Criteria.

This draft version is available at the URI: http://www.abeservices.com.au/schema/2008/05/InspectionTestPlans.rdf.

A good way to view it is to install the Tabulator rdf browser plugin for Firefox as outlined in Description of a Project

It is intended that the Common Inspection and Test Plans ontology evolve as a result of community participation. As well as general feedback it is hoped to also make available a web-based vocabulary editor which would allow for greater collaboration . (Potential options include using Neologism and OntoWiki).

The next steps are to

• add Verification Point(s) and Criteria to the currently identified Inspection and Test Plans
• identify additional concepts related to Inspection and Test Plans, e.g. Hold Points
  
• add some worked examples
  

In a future article I’ll also outline how to query the Common Inspection and Test Plans ontology for specific informaton using the RDF query language SPARQL. A SPARQL end point is currently available at http://abeserver.isa.net.au:2020/ providing a SPARQL Query form .

The “Compliance Data Management Service” for the building, construction and related industries (CDMS) is an example of a web and on-site workplace application that has been around long enough to experience the need to evolve to match the changes in underlying technologies. The iPhone and the Semantic Web are about to drive further evolutions.

Below is an overview of the current mobile phone based web application.

This is the second version of the application. It supports work-place activities in real-time using mobile phones with web browsers capable of supporting XHTML-Mobile Profile web applications.

The original version of CDMS was based on Palm Pilots which operated disconnected from the network. The Palm Pilot version requires a manual synchronization step to update the CDMS application database . At the beginning and end of each day the Palm Pilot synchronizes with the CDMS application database via a desktop computer and a desktop application which passes data via a web service to the CDMS web application.

The iPhone

The iPhone represents a new class of mobile devices. As well as setting a new benchmark for ease of use and providing access to both mobile phone and wireless networks, it also sets a new benchmark for mobile web applications, reducing the gap between a standard desktop web browser and the mobile phone browser. In particular the iPhone is designed to support Web 2.0 and Ajax.

Ryan Breen sums up this evolution in his article In defense of Ajax for the iPhone when he writes “… in a few years I expect all mobile devices to provide the same browsing experience. With that, the line between traditional and mobile web development will further blur, with Ajax frameworks helping developers deliver consistent and appropriate experiences on each.”

The iPhone encourages the use of Ajax and simple intuitive interfaces. Adding these to the main CDMS web application is a good thing in itself and starts to bridge the gap with mobile phone XHTML-Mobile Profile web application. In time, as more phones move to equal the iPhones Ajax support a point may be reached where the CDMS web application and the mobile application are one and the same.

The Semantic Web

The current CDMS application is primarily a data island existing within a web of many potential external relationships. While there is currently one web service interface and more could be added, sharing data as XML still does not the relationships and their semantics to be fully expressed.

Some of the limitations of the current CDMS application are:

1. users and organizations are forced to create yet another set of online accounts rather than using a single signon facility similar to OpenID.
2. the relationships between people, organizations, places and things that are already established outside of CDMS need to be recreated within CDMS.
3. CDMS uses its own internal classification schemes rather than utilizing existing publically available classification ontologies.
4. CDMS uses an internal representation of standards that need to be complied with rather than linking to published standards (One problem for CDMS is that some of the standards are not currently freely available and not available in a suitable on-line form)
5. CDMS uses an internal proprietary representation of organizations and their users
6. CDMS uses an internal proprietary representation of a project structure and its tasks.
7. constraints which could be expressed publicly within an OWL ontology are hidden internally within java source code.
8. geographical location is not expressed in a standard manner.

The document Compliance Applications on the Semantic Web gives an overview of an alternative Semantic Web architecture for CDMS.

Future posts will start to address each of the above limitations.