As more and more civil engineering work becomes digital, the amount of information
that engineers need to handle is growing exponentially. While this presents
opportunities for reusing designs and increasing productivity, there remains the
challenging of navigating around huge repositories of digital content. This
presentation outlines a research line spanning about one decade in Information
Retrieval to manage civil engineering design content, such as drawings and building
models. The field of Information Retrieval is concerned with systems that help users
to fulfil their information needs. Common examples of Information Retrieval systems
include web search engines and library catalogues. The basic aim of the research
presented here can therefore be expressed informally as “to develop search engines
for civil engineering design content”. However, in the case of civil engineering
applications of Information Retrieval, understanding retrieved information is probably
more informant than finding the information in the first place. The emergence of
Building Information Models in recent years adds some urgency to this line of
research
