The goal of the Construction Resources project is to collect, organize, integrate and distribute information developed by the Institute for Research in Construction (IRC). The information sources are of different types, formats and structures, and will be distributed in electronic information to construction practitioners on compact disk media (CD-ROM). The Construction Resources CD provides fast access times for search and retrieval and uses a common, simple and intuitive interface. It is intended as a part of the practitioner's library; residing on a desktop computer, to be used as and when required.
Construction Resources contains over 1.5 million words of text, 600 pages of graphics and 400 pages of tables. Included in the 100 megabytes of information are abstracts of most publications by the IRC, full text of the Canadian Building Codes, and summaries of Canadian Standards Association (CSA) construction standards.
The Construction Resources CD-ROM is currently under evaluation at 100 sites; architects, engineers, construction practitioners, and government and university researchers around the world are participating in the evaluation of the software. The results of the beta test will hopefully lead to the full implementation of a powerful, yet easy to use, information system for the construction industry.
IRC PUBLICATIONS include abstracted information of over 2900 technical papers published by the IRC since 1972, as well as significant publications preceding that year. The fields include standard bibliographic information such as author, title, abstract, name of journal, publication date, and keywords.
PUBLICATIONS de L'IRC include the French versions of the abstracted information for approximately 2000 IRC publications.
CANADIAN BUILDING DIGESTS include a full text collection of all CBD's published since August 1966. It contains over 350 pages of text, graphics and tables. The CBD's are four page synopses for construction practitioners; the topics range from basements to roofing.
BUILDING SCIENCE INSIGHT includes full text of five years of the BSI seminar series. It contains over 400 pages of text, graphics and tables on topical construction technologies such as small buildings, window performance, fire safety and air barriers.
CANADIAN CONSTRUCTION EXPERTISE includes expertise resources in construction research. It contains over 600 records of people, organizations and projects dealing with construction research. The fields related to the experts include name, address, telephone numbers, supporting organization(s), expertise, degrees, publications, societies, and honours. The organization records include organization description, staff members, addresses, and current projects. The project records include name of project, participants, research activities, research publications and funding amounts.
CANADIAN BUILDING CODES: include full text and tables of the 1990 editions of the National Building Code of Canada, the National Fire Code of Canada and the Canadian Farm Building Code. These code documents include over 1000 pages of text. Each of the 10,000 provisions is a record in the dataset. As the record also includes the headings for the sections, it therefore contains all the contextual information needed for keyword searching.
CSA STANDARDS include CONSTRUCTION PLUS, a publication containing summaries of all CSA construction standards. Each of the 300 summaries outlines the scope and content, as well as a listing of requirements and test methods of the standard.
~ "Browser" is an interactive window or palette permitting the navigation functionality such as Next Card, Last Card, Search Card, Index Card, or Find.
~ "Audit Trail" is a tool that saves a pointer to all the records viewed in a session; clicking on the desired record will return the user to that location.
~ "Pull-Down Menus" or keystroke equivalents duplicate the functionality of the Browser, allowing the user to navigate through the datasets or from one record to another.
~ Figures and tables are normally presented as separate windows on the screen. In most cases the user can pan and zoom on the contents of these windows.
~ "Reference Number" permits the user to move directly to a document by typing the exact document name such as 'CBD 65', 'NBC 1.2.1', or 'CSA B78.5'. This can be used at any time or while in any data set.
~ "Cross references" are identified with special iconic representation indicating to the user that additional information can be obtained by clicking at that location. Cross references are used to point to other documents, to tables and figures, and to definitions of terms. The cross references use a Virtual Access Table (VAT); when a cross reference is clicked, the VAT is dynamically checked to see if the reference exist and the user is brought to the proper reference.
The results of the search are displayed in a single line format, detailing the dataset name, dataset record and record heading. The following is the first 15 lines of 46 records dealing with "Fire Escapes":
Searching the entire compact disk will display the results in approximately three seconds. However the user can easily limit the selection to any or all datasets. Clicking on the desired record will bring the user to the full text document in a matter of seconds.
Construction practitioners require data, information, and knowledge in this rapidly advancing industry. Conventional publications are difficult to obtain, awkward to access, onerous to maintain, and expensive to store. The typical construction practitioner is not a computer expert and does not intend to be one. Simple, fast, user-friendly and robust software should be the objective of software developers working with the construction industry. Construction Resources answers both these needs and provides relevant information to building practitioner on their desktop.
Electronic books are the wave of the future, compact disk is one of many media available to information suppliers. Compact Disk Interactive (CD-I), read-write optical disks, and distributed network servers such as Gopher and the Wide World Web all hint at potential distribution networks for conventional publishers. The introduction of Architronic -- the Electronic Journal of Architecture echoes these advances. Each medium has its niche marketplace, and all can provide fast, timely and accurate information to the construction industry.
1. Vanier D.J., A HyperCard National Building Code, Electric Architect, Oct/Nov 1991.
2. Worling, J.L., Vanier D.J., Mellon B.S., Electronic Technical Information: An Access and Distribution System, Proceedings of the Joint CIB Workshops on Computers in Construction, Montreal, P.Q., May 1992.
Material appearing in Architronic may be distributed freely by electronic or any other means, providing that any such distribution is without charge (unless for purposes of cost recovery by interlibrary loan services) and that Architronic is acknowledged as the source. However, no article may be reprinted in any publication without the explicit written permission of the author(s). This statement must accompany all distributions of Architronic, whether complete or partial.