Information retrieval for the management of civil engineering design content

As more and more civil engineering work becomes digital, the amount of information that engineers need to handle is growing exponentially. While this presents opportunities for reusing designs and increasing productivity, there remains the challenging of navigating around huge repositories of digital content. This presentation outlines a research line spanning about one decade in Information Retrieval to manage civil engineering design content, such as drawings and building models. The field of Information Retrieval is concerned with systems that help users to fulfil their information needs. Common examples of Information Retrieval systems include web search engines and library catalogues. The basic aim of the research presented here can therefore be expressed informally as “to develop search engines for civil engineering design content”. However, in the case of civil engineering applications of Information Retrieval, understanding retrieved information is probably more informant than finding the information in the first place. The emergence of Building Information Models in recent years adds some urgency to this line of research.