Ontological base for concrete bridge rehabilitation projects

Concrete bridges are important infrastructures, which thus need effective rehabilitation to maintain good condition. Bridge rehabilitation projects often have tight schedules, multiple participants and constraints, and scattered project information. Thus, improving information integration in these projects can be critical. This research develops a concrete bridge rehabilitation project management ontology (CBRPMO) to integrate various project information, e.g. information of constraints, tasks, procedures, project participants, and relations between these project entities. The CBRPMO was built based on domain knowledge collected from various documents and was refined in a focus group. The development followed standard procedures. The CBRPMO was also validated in a case study. It turns out the CBRPMO can effectively integrate information and support effective querying, which can save time to manually search for information from scattered sources. The CBRPMO contributes to industry because it expands the boundary and application of ontologies for bridge maintenance by covering the rehabilitation stage.