Architecture,
engineering and construction projects involve a number of individuals
and organizations with different roles and responsibilities. In a new
project, participants may initially not know each other; however, to be
effective, those with a common interest must be able to easily find each
other to share their knowledge about the project. Another requirement
for effectively managing a project is the ability to easily add new
knowledge to the project knowledgebase. The current format for
representing, accessing, and sharing project data cannot take advantage
of the full potential of the Internet. The Internet allows producing
distributed information that can be easily combined and shared. It is
also a powerful medium for communication among individuals with a common
interest who may not know each other. This paper presents a project
social networking website that facilitates professional interactions
among a project's participants and provides a dynamic project knowledge
base that would allow combining knowledge created during various phases
of a project lifecycle. The participants in a new project may join the
project website using OpenID. The project website uses a semantics-based
approach to information modeling that allows project website members to
add new knowledge to the project knowledge base and perform graph query
on project data. The project website members can tag any piece of
information in the project knowledge base to their social interactions. ©
ASCE 2014.