Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

WEB BASED 3D VISUALISATION OF TIME-VARYING AIR QUALITY INFORMATION

Many countries where the industrial development and production rates are high face many side effects of low air quality and air pollution. There is an evident correlation between the topographic and climatic properties of a location and the air pollution and air quality on that location. As the variation of air quality is dependent on location, air quality information should be acquired, utilised, stored and presented in form of Geo-Information. On the other hand, as this information is related with the health concerns of public, the information should be available publicly, and needs to be presented through an easily accessible medium and through a commonly used interface. Efficient storage of time-varying air quality information when combined with an efficient mechanism of 3D web-based visualisation would help very much in dissemination of air quality information to public. This research is focused on web-based 3D visualisation of time-varying air quality data. A web based interactive system is developed to visualise pollutant levels that were acquired as hourly intervals from more than 100 stations in Turkey between years 2008 and 2017. The research also concentrated on visualisation of geospatial high volume data. In the system, visualisation can be achieved on-demand by querying an air pollutant information database of 10.330.629 records and a city object database with more than 700.000 records. The paper elaborates on the details of this research. Following a background on air quality, air quality models, and Geo-Information visualisation, the system architecture and functionality is presented. The paper concludes with results of usability tests of the system

Energy analysis of wall materials using building information modeling (BIM) of public buildings in the tropical climate countries

During the previous two decades, the energy saving potential using systematic building management is considered to be important which should be considered through the building lifecycle. Among the wide range types of different buildings, Public buildings are considered as one of the biggest energy-consuming sector in the world and major part of this amount is used by the air conditioning system especially in tropical climates. The most effective decisions related to sustainable design of a building facility are made in the feasibility and early design stages. Building Information Modeling (BIM) can expedite this process and provide the opportunity of testing and assessing different design alternatives and materials selection that may impact on energy performance of buildings. This paper aims at evaluating the efficiency of various types of wall materials with regard to theirs properties on energy saving. The case study in this paper is modeled by means of BIM application and then simulated by software, which is appropriate for energy analysis. The current energy consumption patterns of this case identified and shifted to the optimized level of energy usages by changing the walls materials to find most optimized of walls materials. Modification most optimized wall materials and energy analysis indicated 9347 Wh in Per meter square of electrical energy saving

The LADM Valuation Information Model and its application to the Turkey case

Spatial data in a Land Administration (LA) establish a fundamental geospatial data theme (see UN GGIM, 2018) and the integrated geospatial information framework for any Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Domain-specific standards, an integral component of the SDI, play an essential role to represent the semantics of domains, specify links between distributed registries and databases, and stimulate the development and implementation for Land Administration Systems (LAS). As an international descriptive standard providing an abstract conceptual schema, the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) has been used and is being used as a reference for the implementation of LAS. Various approaches have been used for the LADM implementation that includes elaborating (via a country profile) and realizing a technical model suitable for the implementation (van Oosterom and Lemmen, 2015). LADM focuses on a specific function of LA that is interested in Rights, Responsibilities and Restrictions (RRR) affecting land, and the geometrical components thereof. The land value function of LA is considered outside the scope in the first edition. Recently, for extending the flexible and modular basis of the LADM, a valuation information model is developed for the specification of valuation information maintained by public authorities. It identifies the links between property valuation and the other LA registries and databases (e.g., cadastre, land registry, building and dwelling registries) that may enable interoperability across systems. The conceptual schema of the model provides a common basis to direct the development of local and national valuation databases and information technology products and services, following an approach similar to the LADM implementation. The proposed LADM Valuation Information Model is on the agenda of the development of the second edition of LADM within ISO/TC211. The operability of the newly proposed conceptual model needs to be evaluated through technical implementation. This paper describes the development of a prototype for the implementation of the LADM Valuation Information Model and assesses its operability through a case study for Turkey. The primary aim of the paper is to test the capabilities of the LADM Valuation Information Model using the required and produced data in recurrent valuation processes, but not to build a specific information management system for Turkey. As the implementation of a LADM compliant prototype initially requires the development of a country profile at conceptual level, methodologies applied for LADM profile development are examined and then a Turkish LADM Valuation Information Model country profile is proposed using the Conceptual Schema Languages (CSL) of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and INTERLIS. INTERLIS is a formal language as well as a set of software tools that support LADM implementations. Subsequently, approaches and tools used in the LADM implementation are investigated and utilized for the automated transformations from the country profile to several technical models. In this context, the article presents the experiences gained during the implementations. Moreover, strategies for implementing and managing property valuation information more efficiently (e.g. bi-temporal aspects of valuation information management) are also studied and applied to the implementation. The generated technical models are then populated with sample datasets related to recurrent property valuation including the geometries of valuation units, as well as valuation information covering several years. The developed prototype is then tested through a number of queries to assess whether the LADM Valuation Information Model fulfils information management needs of recurrent valuations. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a holistic approach on how to develop an LADM conformant prototype for managing property valuation information

IFC2INDOORGML: an open-source tool for generating indoorgml from ifc

The interest in 3D indoor models has been continuously growing. Most such models are made available as point clouds or BIM (e.g., IFC), the former being generally provided as unstructured information while the latter comes highly structured and rich in semantic information. IFC models are consequently more suitable for direct use, but they can be very complex and contain too many details, which often raises privacy concerns. IndoorGML is one of the standards for describing 3D indoor space with the purpose of supporting Location Based Services (LBS). It relies on solid scientific concepts and offers a high flexibility with extension mechanisms. It provides a geometric, topological, and semantic description of the indoor which facilitates specifically applications like indoor navigation or facility management. Additionally, it can represent complex indoor environments without compromising privacy, thanks to its high level of abstraction. However, despite its solid conceptual basis, IndoorGML is suffering from a lack of practical tools and remains hard to produce, making it largely unavailable. In this project, we developed an open-source tool named ifc2indoorgml allowing to automatically generate IndoorGML models from IFC data. We discuss the workflow and the different development approaches. By making such tool available to the wider public, we expect more 3D IndoorGML models to be created and made freely available for research and development within the spatial community and beyond.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. RYC2020-029193-

digital 3d control room for healthcare

The building process is in an evolutionary phase dictated by the constructive innovations and the digital revolution that has involved the tools and the technical and design contents of the entire life cycle of buildings. In this context, the operators of the sector need to develop organizational models capable of protecting and managing the conceptual and scale transition, between the conceptual framework of the architecture and the subsequent ones of construction, use and management. In the development of complex projects the elaboration of the organizational model is in fact fundamental to reach adequate figurative, performance and qualitative levels by incorporating the necessary contents of environmental, economic and management sustainability of buildings. This text illustrates the development of a horizontal organizational model for the smart and dynamic control of complex buildings through the creation of an innovative digital Web-Based platform capable of integrating Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology with a "Facility Management platform". The project involves experimentation applied to a real case involving the restructuring of a complex building

A state-of-the-art review on the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS)

The integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) has been identified as a promising but challenging topic to transform information towards the generation of knowledge and intelligence. Achievement of integrating these two concepts and enabling technologies will have a significant impact on solving problems in the civil, building and infrastructure sectors. However, since GIS and BIM were originally developed for different purposes, numerous challenges are being encountered for the integration. To better understand these two different domains, this paper reviews the development and dissimilarities of GIS and BIM, the existing integration methods, and investigates their potential in various applications. This study shows that the integration methods are developed for various reasons and aim to solve different problems. The parameters influencing the choice can be summarized and named as "EEEF" criteria: effectiveness, extensibility, effort, and flexibility. Compared with other methods, semantic web technologies provide a promising and generalized integration solution. However, the biggest challenges of this method are the large efforts required at early stage and the isolated development of ontologies within one particular domain. The isolation problem also applies to other methods. Therefore, openness is the key of the success of BIM and GIS integration

Comparative cytotoxicity of artemisinin and cisplatin and their interactions with chlorogenic acids in MCF7 breast cancer cells.

In parts of Africa and Asia, self-medication with a hot water infusion of Artemisia annua (Artemisia tea) is a common practice for a number of ailments including malaria and cancer. In our earlier work, such an extract showed better potency than artemisinin alone against both chloroquine-sensitive and -resistant parasites. In this study, in vitro tests of the infusion in MCF7 cells showed high IC50 values (>200 μM). The combination of artemisinin and 3-caffeoylquinic acid (3CA), two major components in the extract, was strongly antagonistic and gave a near total loss of cytotoxicity for artemisinin. We observed that the interaction of 3CAs with another cytotoxic compound, cisplatin, showed potentiation of activity by 2.5-fold. The chelation of cellular iron by 3CA is hypothesized as a possible explanation for the loss of artemisinin activity.This study was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK) and SensaPharm Ltd. via an Industrial CASE PhD studentship. The award was allocated competitively by the Chemistry Innovation Knowledge Transfer Network (CIKTN, UK).This is the final published version. It was originally published by Wiley at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cmdc.201402285/abstract