Unpacking Ambiguity in Building Requirements to Support Automated Compliance Checking

In the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, manual compliance checking is labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. Automated compliance checking (ACC) has been extensively studied in the past 50 years to improve the productivity and accuracy of the compliance checking process. While numerous ACC systems have been proposed, these systems can only deal with requirements that include quantitative metrics or specified properties. This leaves the remaining 53% of building requirements to be checked manually, mainly due to the ambiguity embedded in them. In the literature, little is known about the ambiguity of building requirements, which impedes their accurate interpretation and automated checking. This research thus aims to address this issue and establish a taxonomy of ambiguity. Building requirements in health building notes (HBNs) are analyzed using an inductive approach. The results show that some ambiguous clauses in building requirements reflect regulators’ intention while others are unintentional, resulting from the use of language, tacit knowledge, and ACC-specific reasons. This research is valuable for compliance-checking researchers and practitioners because it unpacks ambiguity in building requirements, laying a solid foundation for addressing ambiguity appropriately

Addressing the tacit knowledge of a digital library system

Recent surveys, about the Linked Data initiatives in library organizations, report the experimental nature of related projects and the difficulty in re-using data to provide improvements of library services. This paper presents an approach for managing data and its "tacit" organizational knowledge, as the originating data context, improving the interpretation of data meaning. By analyzing a Digital Libray system, we prototyped a method for turning data management into a "semantic data management", where local system knowledge is managed as a data, and natively foreseen as a Linked Data. Semantic data management aims to curates the correct consumers' understanding of Linked Datasets, driving to a proper re-use

Explicating Tacit Knowledge Embedded in Nominalisation

This research is a field study on how tacit knowledge is construed by IT professionals through nominalisation in their language and how this knowledge may be explicated in grammar-based interviews. The study was conducted over four months of interviews with a team working on a Content Management System (CMS) redevelopment project in an Australian media organisation. The broad aim of the interviews was to elicit tacit knowledge from these technologists about their work on this project. This paper focuses on a specific aspect of this endeavour: unpacking knowledge about process that was embedded in the talk of the participants through the grammatical feature, nominalisation. We employ linguistic analysis techniques drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics to achieve this end. While we adopt Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing, we depart from this theory by arguing that tacit knowledge is carried in language and that linguistic analysis techniques offer rich methods for understanding such knowledge

The Explicit Economics of Knowledge Codification and Tacitness

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Securing intellectual capital:an exploratory study in Australian universities

Purpose – To investigate the links between IC and the protection of data, information and knowledge in universities, as organizations with unique knowledge-related foci and challenges.Design/methodology/approach – We gathered insights from existing IC-related research publications to delineate key foundational aspects of IC, identify and propose links to traditional information security that impact the protection of IC. We conducted interviews with key stakeholders in Australian universities in order to validate these links.Findings – Our investigation revealed two kinds of embeddedness characterizing the organizational fabric of universities: (1) vertical and (2) horizontal, with an emphasis on the connection between these and IC-related knowledge protection within these institutions.Research implications – There is a need to acknowledge the different roles played by actors within the university, and the relevance of information security to IC-related preservation.Practical implications – Framing information security as an IC-related issue can help IT security managers communicate the need for knowledge security with executives in higher education, and secure funding to preserve and secure such IC-related knowledge, once its value is recognized.Originality/value – This is one of the first studies to explore the connections between data and information security and the three core components of IC’s knowledge security in the university context

Unpacking capabilities underlying design (thinking) process

Engineering graduates must know how to frame and solve non-routine problems. While design classes explicitly teach problem framing and solving, it is lacking throughout much of the rest of the engineering curriculum and is often relegated to capstone classes at the end of the students’ educational experience. This paper explores problem framing and solving through the lens of experiential learning theory. It captures core problem framing and solving approaches from critical, design and systems thinking and concludes with a table of learning outcomes that might be drawn upon in designing an engineering curriculum that more fully develops the problem framing and solving capabilities of its students

Factors Affecting Knowledge Transfer in Project Environments

Most project teams consist of knowledge workers, and the issue of how to better transfer knowledge across individuals and groups becomes a central concern. The main purpose of this article is to study the factors affecting the knowledge transfer process and their importance for project’s success. The factors analyzed in this article are trust among individuals, members of the team, project culture, values and the beliefs of the individuals and motivation of those involved in the project, both intrinsic and extrinsic. In order to overcome the barriers affecting the knowledge transfer process, project managers must create an environment where knowledge workers must feel free to share and re-use their knowledge.barriers; knowledge transfer; motivation; trust; project management.

Prototyping to Leverage Learning in Product Manufacturing Environments

AbstractRooted in the automotive industry, this article discusses the topic of leveraging tacit knowledge through prototyping. After first providing an overview on learning and knowledge, the Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization (SECI) model is discussed in detail, with a clear distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge. Based on this model, we propose a framework for using said reflective and affirmative prototyping in an external vs. internal learning/knowledge capturing and transfer setting. Contextual examples from select automotive manufacturing R&D projects are given to demonstrate the importance and potential in applying more effective strategies for knowledge transformation in engineering design

Universities, regional policy and the knowledge economy

This article focuses on the spatial clustering dimension of new information and communications technology (ICT)-driven economic activity based on knowledge industries and especially the tacit knowledge synergies to be achieved through networking in geographical space. The article first details the new knowledge economy, reviewing claims made for its distinctiveness and its role in raising levels of productivity before turning to a brief study of the clustering effects of new ICT-driven economic activity and the development of policies designed to enhance regional development. The remainder of the article details a case study – Univercities: the Manchester Knowledge Capital Initiative – in the North-west of the United Kingdom based on recent research into the attempt to create a ‘Knowledge Capital’ within the Greater Manchester conurbation, which is designed to position Manchester at the heart of the knowledge economy

Reframing resources in engineering teaching and learning

Abstract: The notion of ‘resources’ is often framed in an economic sense: money, time, equipment and the like. We reconceptualise this notion, situating resources as embedded in curricular frameworks, teacher practice and student experience. This leads us to define resources as the potential to participate in socio-cultural action. We illustrate this through a series of reflections on the part of the authors, all within the context of engineering education. First, we demonstrate that curriculum can be productively thought of as a route marker for the development of resources that students need in order to enact their role as professional engineers. Thereafter, we show that lecturers bring tacit resources of trust, care, creativity and credibility to the teaching and learning space, and that these are necessary to overcome the inertia that often resists the transformation of teaching and learning practice. Finally, we reflect on how students’ prior learning experiences can be harnessed as a resource for teaching and learning. In so doing, we present resources as tied to sociocultural practices and personal and institutional histories, and encourage others to take up these ideas so as to consider how resources, viewed in our sense, are valued within (engineering) education