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Civil engineering academics are caught between a science-based university culture on one side, and on the other, the expectations of students and practicing engineers in industry who want practical knowledge for immediate application. The science-based culture primarily measures faculty by research projects and funding, Ph.D. students produced, and by papers refereed primarily by academic peers for publication and citation in scholarly journals. There are strong pressures to produce these outputs, which are duly quantified for tenure and promotion decisions but the system does not directly reward time spent gaining practical experience in full-time or part time jobs prior to academic employment, or later in summers or sabbaticals, or in solving problems through consultations. This paper will address the balance between academia and practice, and focus on the residential building sector of the design and construction industry as one that is largely neglected by engineering programs. In particular, it will show where the design and construction of residential structures can provide opportunities to enhance engineering education and open new avenues for broad, interdisciplinary research that are different from those where engineering academics normally venture. In conclusion, it will focus on academics who successfully bridge the realm of academia and the world around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the Uniclass construction information classification system developed by the International Standards Organization. Analysis of practical adaptability of Uniclass compared to the Construction Index/Samarbetskommitten for Byggnadsfragor; Methods for improving adaptability to civil engineering works.

This article describes a unified system architecture for representation and reasoning in a concurrent, collaborative architectural/engineering/construction (AEC) environment. The architecture is built on a formal unified modeling methodology for products and processes based on parametrics techniques. The architecture forms the core of a domain-independent shell that could be used for incremental knowledge integration. The integrated knowledge base could be used at any point of inference to propagate changes in data values or knowledge items using parameter-dependency networks. The article concentrates on the representation standards of the core elements of the collaborative architecture. It starts by describing the needs set by the nature of project organization in the AEC industry as well as the research philosophy. The article briefly illustrates the generic parametric representation and inference foundation, including the role of exogenous variables in domain knowledge control. The article concentrates on the standards of object-oriented representation that form the core of domain modeling and knowledge integration. The representation covers various tasks such as context knowledge control for version management, knowledge integration with other systems, and efficient propagation control. The article shows that the careful use of domain knowledge in modeling the problem and controlling inference through exogenous variables provides guidelines toward creating sound standards for representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which suggests a tentative construction information classification system (CICS) for civil engineering projects. Components of the CICS system; Identification of information classification systems which engineers can utilize; Benefits of quantity surveying; Examination of the notation system in CICS.