KNOWLEDGE REUSE THROUGH CHANCE DISCOVERY FROM AN ENTERPRISE DESIGN-BUILD ENTERPRISE DATA STORE

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities of chance discovery in building design and construction knowledge towards knowledge reuse from past project experiences captured in a enterprise data store. The proposed approach leverages two innovative technologies, (1) ThinkTank™, a web-based asynchronous collaboration technology developed at the Project Based Learning Lab at Stanford University that provides many of the advantages of face-to-face team meetings combined with the utility of e-mail and the organization of content in a database; and (2) Techniques of chance discovery, composed of the Double Helix process of chance discovery, and KeyGraph, a method of visualizing the content of human communications, developed in the laboratory of Chance Discovery at the University of Tsukuba. An overview of the ThinkTank™ and KeyGraph is presented. The validation testbed is described and a concrete scenario of chance discovery of reusable knowledge from a past project is presented to illustrate the value of linking an enterprise data store such as ThinkTank™ and KeyGraph. The paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of the double helix concept, i.e. first helix represented by the KeyGraph computer processing of the ThinkTank™ data, and the second helix represented by human interpretation and exploration of the KeyGraph representation of ThinkTank™ data. We emphasize that without the second helix, i.e. the human interpretation, contextualization and exploration of the results, the KeyGraph would offer only a visual representation of the data, but would not provide valuable input for decision making or knowledge reuse.