Towards Developing an Ontology for Earthwork Operations

In a typical construction project, a significant amount of information is communicated to various stakeholders at different phases of the project lifecycle. The communication of this information tends to be informal and ad-hoc in the majority of the cases, which makes it more susceptible to loss of information or misinterpretation. Earthwork operations, which are one of the main operations of construction projects, also struggle with the challenge of effective information communication. There is an apparent shortcoming regarding the unified structure for data and information exchange in this domain. The existing models and ontologies do not address the explicit semantic representation of the earthwork operations. Accordingly, there is a need for a knowledge model to formalize the communication of information in an efficient manner. An ontological model can be used to organize the domain knowledge so that it can be utilized and reused by the stakeholders, e.g., project managers, designers, etc. This paper purposes a framework to develop an ontology for earthwork operations to support and enhance data exchange and communication among different stakeholders in the project. The main objectives of this paper are (1) to formalize the knowledge in the earthwork domain, and (2) to build an ontology that captures this formalization. The ultimate result of this ontology, which is demonstrated by means of a case study, is to facilitate the development of data standards that can be shared in actual projects to accelerate project execution.