Semantic Grid Roadmap

Conclusion: While the first level of information systems was built to assist humans in real world processes, the increasing complexity of the ITC infrastructures calls for a second level of information systems that will assist in making a better use of ITC. All business process roadmaps are foreseeing a strong role of ICT in the future. Semantic grid has a potential to be a highway in these roadmaps or a dead end into which substantial effort will be placed, but that will not address the needs of the users. We will not know, unless we try it out, looking carefully at the technology pull in some areas and applying the technology push if a breakthrough seems possible

Working Together: ICT Infrastructures to Support Collaboration

The paper summarizes a part of research carried out in ICCI project and provides a current review of ICT infrastructures supporting collaboration. It covers taxonomies, protocols, standards, components, typical subsystems as well as future trends and recommendation for two most important technologies with applications in AEC: (1) EIP (Enterprise information portal) – a single gateway to a company's information, knowledge base, and applications for all actors; (2) RTC (Real-Time Communication and Collaboration technologies) that provide means for asynchronous communication between geographically dislocated people using ICT. Proposed future developments are: orientation towards web services - with building information models, business intelligence, personalization, AEC information retrieval, p2p workspaces and grids

Working Together: ICT Infrastructures to Support Collaboration

The paper summarizes a part of research carried out in ICCI project and provides a current review of ICT infrastructures supporting collaboration. It covers taxonomies, protocols, standards, components, typical subsystems as well as future trends and recommendation for two most important technologies with applications in AEC: (1) EIP (Enterprise information portal) – a single gateway to a company's information, knowledge base, and applications for all actors; (2) RTC (Real-Time Communication and Collaboration technologies) that provide means for asynchronous communication between geographically dislocated people using ICT. Proposed future developments are: orientation towards web services - with building information models, business intelligence, personalization, AEC information retrieval, p2p workspaces and grids

The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon): An Open Access Journal Using an Un-paid, Volunteer-Based Organization

Introduction This case study is based on the experiences with the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon), founded in 1995. Development This journal is an example of a particular category of open access journals, which use neither author charges nor subscriptions to finance their operations, but rely largely on unpaid voluntary work in the spirit of the open source movement. The journal has, after some initial struggle, survived its first decade and is now established as one of half-a-dozen peer reviewed journals in its field. Operations The journal publishes articles as they become ready, but creates virtual issues through alerting messages to “subscribers”. It has also started to publish special issues, since this helps in attracting submissions, and also helps in sharing the work-load of review management. From the start the journal adopted a rather traditional layout of the articles. After the first few years the HTML version was dropped and papers are only published in PDF format. Performance The journal has recently been benchmarked against the competing journals in its field. Its acceptance rate of 53% is slightly higher and its average turnaround time of seven months almost a year faster compared to those journals in the sample for which data could be obtained. The server log files for the past three years have also been studied. Conclusions Our overall experience demonstrates that it is possible to publish this type of OA journal, with a yearly publishing volume equal to a quarterly journal and involving the processing of some fifty submissions a year, using a networked volunteer-based organization

How Scientists Retrieve Publications: An Empirical Study of How the Internet Is Overtaking Paper Media

The current mainstream scientific-publication process has so far been only marginally affected by the possibilities offered by the Internet, despite some pioneering attempts with free electronic-only journals and electronic preprint archives. Additional electronic versions of traditional paper journals for which one needs a subscription are not a solution. A clear trend, for young researchers in particular, is to go around subscription barriers (both for paper and electronic material) and rely almost exclusively on what they can find free on the Internet, which often includes working versions posted on the home pages of the authors. A survey of how scientists retrieve publications was conducted in February 2000, aimed at measuring to what extent the opportunities offered by the Internet are already changing the scientific information exchange and how researchers feel about this. This paper presents the results based on 236 replies to an extensive Web-based questionnaire, which was announced to around 3,000 researchers in the domains of construction information technology and construction management. The questions dealt with how researchers find, access, and read different sources; how many and what publications they read; how often and to which conferences they travel; how much they publish, and criteria for where they eventually decide to publish. Some of the questions confronted traditional and electronic publishing, with one final section dedicated to opinions about electronic publishing. According to the survey, researchers already download half of the material that they read digitally from the Web. The most popular method for retrieving an interesting publication is downloading it for free from the author's or publisher's Web site. Researchers are not particularly willing to pay for electronic scientific publications. There is much support for a scenario of electronic journals available freely in their entirety on the Web, where the costs could be covered by, for instance, professional societies or the publishing university

SciX project: lowering the technical, economic and social barriers to open scientific publishing

The scientific publication process has been so far only marginally affected by the possibilities of the Internet. The reason is a lack of sound business models and pilots to demonstrate the ultimate benefits of free scientific publication. A team of universities, Internet publishers and applied research institutes proposes to demonstrate these benefits and re-engineer parts of the scientific publication process by: (a) building a fully functioning on-line service, where scientific work, including results of EU projects, would be available for free (with content from architecture, engineering and construction - AEC) and where a virtual on-line community of authors and readers would meet. To support a business model where minimal costs are associated into the process it will enhance the technologies for the (b) self organising maintenance and (c) intelligent user interfaces and finally (d) define business models where scientific work would be wrapped by commercial sites that would make the content more appealing to the industrial audience

Scientific publication process re-engineering with SciX open publication services

A synthesis of the results of the SciX project, in particular how the publication process analysis reflects in the technical and organizational invention