El-Diraby, T E and Wang, B (2005) Society portal: Integrating urban highway construction projects into the knowledge city. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 131(11), pp. 1196-1211. ISSN 0733-9364
Abstract
Community involvement is an important factor for sustainable highway construction. Information and communication technologies provide a new and more effective approach to facilitate community involvement. However, there are too many parameters with conflicting and subjective definitions related to sustainability and too many stakeholders with varying degrees of interest and sophistication. There is a need for an effective tool to communicate project impacts on sustainability to local communities. This paper presents an ontology for stakeholder management and sustainability in highway construction. An ontology is a conceptual semantic model that attempts to capture human knowledge (both explicit and tacit) in a consistent manner. Ontologies include three main elements: a taxonomy (common vocabulary presented in concept trees), set of relationships (linking concepts across trees), and axioms (limitation/ constraints on the behavior of concepts). The ontology was used to develop a portal for broadcasting highway design features to local communities. By browsing through the portal, a user can learn about project elements, the impacts of each element on sustainability issues, who is sponsoring such element, and what efforts have been made to reduce any impacts of such elements on local communities.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | community relations; highway construction; public participation; sustainable development; urban areas |
| Index terms: | stakeholder management, urban area, public participation, information and communication technology, community relations, society, community involvement, ontology, taxonomy, sustainable development, highway construction |
| Subjects: | health safety and environment, computing systems, community and social dimensions, data analysis and analytics, participation process, communities and social development, community engagement, education and knowledge transfer, civil engineering, urban form and morphology |
| Topics: | Research Practice, Engineering Principles, Digital Applications, Stakeholder Management, Urban Studies, Health and Safety |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here