Applications Of Geographic Information Systems In Construction Management

Construction management is one of the fields of Civil Engineering. It includes planning, analyzing, coordinating and controlling of sequential activities in construction site. The primary goals of construction management are to minimize the loss of time and construction costs by appropriate materials, adequate labor and resource selection. These objectives can be achieved by current and updated continuous information flow between participants and departments of construction organization. When information sharing doesn’t happen effectively and timely it results delays and additional costs at the construction projects. Information technology has become prominent position in the development of technology. It supplies some opportunities to construction industry. One of the important parts of information technology is geographic information systems. It provides effective solutions to the locational based problems so they are used in many areas. The possibilities of using GIS in construction management and new models have been developed in various countries in the world in recent years. In this study, using GIS in construction management is investigated and a new method in construction management is tried to develop by use of GIS. Another aim is to supervise all data related with construction on a single platform. A new office block in Erbil is determined as a case study. Project drawings of the building are brought to three-dimensional form in GIS and it is visualized according to the data in the schedule of construction. Database support and visualization feature of GIS is put forward in this paper

Sustainability In Construction Projects: Part 2 (Case Studies)

The guideline developed in a companion study by the authors is applied and studied in this work to assess the sustainability score of several big construction projects in Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Results were varied as the sustainability measures being applied on certain steps and neglected on many others .Attention on this issue can be found in the conclusions

Environmental Pollution and Impacts of Dust Storms on the Traffic Safety

The study aims to investigate the negative effect that the dust storms leave on the human health in general and on the traffic safety as well. Five represented samples of the dust have been collected from the storms which occurred during (2009 and 2010) in Tikrit city/ north of Iraq to find it's particle size distribution, existence of heavy metals, and radioactive minerals, in addition, a survey that consists from 70 samples has been collected to examine the driving difficulty during such condition. Grain size analysis show that the silt size forming the majority (62.6% ), fine sand (23.52%) and clay (13.88%) , also CaCO3 and organic content have been determined with average (25.9%) and (2.11%) respectively. The heavy metals including Cd, Ni, Pb, Cr, Co, and Zn showing that Zn , Ni, Co and Cr are more than the standards in the crust of the earth which considered pollutant elements while Cd and Pb are less than the standards. It was found that 92% of the drivers face difficulty during driving in dusty weather, 47% of the drivers has health problems concerns the dusty weather and 20% of them tend to change their destination or drive faster when they face dust storm while drivin

Folds of Authoritarianism: Political Mobilization, Financial Capitalism, and Islamism in Turkey

Beginning with 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has mobilized millions of Turkish citizens from the most impoverished districts of Istanbul. Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in two districts of Istanbul (Esenler and Kucukcekmece), the party’s stronghold, this dissertation focuses on the conjunction of neoliberal economic transformations, mass mobilization and political Islam. By paying close attention to personal histories, daily capacities, emerging hopes and inter-generational grievances of the party members and sympathizers, it investigates how material and financial transformations facilitate and even promote a popular knowledge that authoritarian politics, embodied by the AKP in Turkey, are the only solution for the predicaments of late capitalism. The project aims to problematize some key presumptions of contemporary social scientific analyses, namely individualization, depoliticization, and economic rationality, and investigates the emergence of alternative practices in their steads: self-negation, authoritarian mobilization, and fundamentalist disposition. To this end, the dissertation intervenes in four current debates of social scientific and public significance. Firstly, against the long standing debates about the character and consequences of neoliberal transformation in the global south, in which the general consensus is that these new economic practices have resulted in depoliticization and apathy among the masses, the project demonstrates that the very same economic polices and practices result in the promotion of a form of mass mobilization that is authoritarian in its characteristics. Second, it intervenes in a related literature about depoliticization, which claims that the contemporary form of capitalism produces isolated individuals, i.e. individuation. The dissertation shows that neoliberal transformations have precipitated a wide range of political and social practices, like self-sacrifice of partisans, which produce alternative modes of political identification and new identities conditioned by economic vulnerability. Third, the research and analysis argues that the critique of bureaucracy and bureaucratic regulations, conceived as sources of unproductivity and institutional rigidities by neoliberal thought collectives, has been appropriated by the masses in Turkey as a part of anti-formalist policies that the AKP propagates. However, the popular critique of bureaucracy among the AKP partisans does not produce a version of liberal governance, in which transparency, flexibility, and accountability are dominant values, but a popular conviction that rules, regulations, and laws may be suspended for the interest of “the people,” thus legitimizing the violation of “bureaucratic” rights, be they human rights, freedom of speech, or fair trial principle. Lastly, this dissertation furthers a significant body of anthropological works on political Islam that complicates the relationships between secularism and religiosity by showing their co-constituted histories. However, it substantially diverges from the trajectory of this literature by shifting the focus from morality to efficacy, from cultural politics to political economy. Ultimately, the purpose of the dissertation is to understand how neoliberal economic transformations provided a suitable social, material and political context for religiously informed authoritarian practices without attributing any essentialized qualities to their religious characteristics

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse