AUTHORING TOOLS FOR KOC
A Knowledge Repository to Teach Building Construction
German Bravo, David Cifuentes
Universidad de Los Andes, Kra. 1Este # 19A-40, Bogotá, Colombia
Rafael Villazon
Universidad de Los Andes, Kra. 1Este # 19A-40, Bogotá, Colombia
Keywords: Knowledge objects, Knowledge based systems, Authoring tools.
Abstract: Composition and authoring tools constitute fundamental instruments to facilitate the generation of new
knowledge to experts in a domain, because it allows the construction of high level knowledge objects from
other already existing knowledge objects. Content generators within the KOC system, a knowledge
repository for construction objects based on the ArCo ontology (which covers the technical area of
buildings’ construction in Architecture), can benefit significantly from this kind of tools, because they allow
them to generate new complex knowledge objects, by taking advantage of the structure defined by ArCo.
This paper presents three composition tools for KOC: a complex objects composer issued from structured
searches, a constructive processes composer and a case study composer, all of them aiming the
improvement of learning quality in the building construction technical area at the architecture and
engineering schools.
1 INTRODUCTION
The learning of construction in Architecture courses
is a problem of high complexity and implies a great
challenge to educators and researchers (Villazon,
2005). Inherent restrictions to the constructive
activity prevents the students of visiting the
construction sites in real time, such as physical
difficulty to access the site, security and risks of the
visit, the difficulty to match the academic and the
construction project calendars, among others. On the
other side, construction companies have to deal with
these same problems when training their new
employees.
The KOC project (Knowledge Objects of
Construction) (Villazon & Bravo, 2007a) faces this
problem by means of five great axes. The first one
structures the different concepts for building
construction in Architecture and their relationships
in an ontology, called ArCo (Architectural
Concepts) (Villazon & Bravo & Cifuentes, 2008).
The second one defines a formal process to gather
quality data throughout the whole construction
process of real projects (Vela, 2007). The third one
allows the annotation of these collected data using
the ArCo ontology and to storage them into a
knowledge repository. The fourth one provides a
highly semantic searching and querying of content in
the repository. Finally, the fifth axe, and main
subject of this paper, provides several authoring
tools, composers, to generate complex knowledge
objects, based on existing “simple” knowledge
objects in the repository. The result is a repository of
high quality architectural knowledge objects, clearly
described, and re-usable. In addition it provides
mechanisms to high level queries, responding to
architects (professional, teachers and students)
requirements.
This paper first presents the main concepts of
KOC and ArCo. The second part presents a brief
description of three composers. Finally, some
obtained results and some outcomes are presented.
2 GLOBAL VISION OF KOC
The development context of authoring tools consists
357
Bravo G., Cifuentes D. and Villazon R. (2009).
AUTHORING TOOLS FOR KOC - A Knowledge Repository to Teach Building Construction.
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, pages 357-360
DOI: 10.5220/0002259003570360
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

of the ontology allowing the description of data
(ArCo), the knowledge objects repository (KOC),
and how they are used to annotate the data and later
to improve the knowledge generation by means of
authoring tools.
2.1 ArCo: The Ontology
ArCo (Architectural Concepts) is an ontology that
structures a knowledge base in the technical area of
the Architecture.
Figure 1: Main scheme of ArCo.
ArCo aims to respond several questions about
the technical area of building construction.
 What can be constructed? It makes reference
to the construction objects constituting the
kernel of the ontology, represented by
architectonic elements and spaces. Every
construction object in ArCo represents an
idealized instance to which real objects are
related.
 Why or What For these objects are
constructed? It makes reference to the
intended functionalities and performance of
these construction objects, in three
fundamental categories: habitability, water
tightness and stability.
 Where and When these objects are
constructed? It makes reference to a Work
Breakdown Structure (WBS) (Rodriguez,
1998), which classifies the elements in
systems, subsystems and elements and also
defines the chronological order of activities
leading to their construction.
 How these objects are constructed? It
explains the choosing of materials,
techniques and equipment to construct the
element correctly.
Figure 1 presents a diagram of these concepts
within the ontology and their relationships. A more
detailed definition can be found in (Villazon &
Bravo & Cifuentes, 2008).
2.2 KOC: The Knowledge Objects of
Construction Repository
KOC is a web-based knowledge repository of
objects “talking about” the technical area of
construction in Architecture. The main
functionalities provided by KOC include the access
of data and collaborative edition to students,
professors and professional architects in general.
The KOC strategy consists of incrementally
adding knowledge to data. The first level is the raw
data represented by a file and its metadata; the
second level annotates the data in terms of ArCo,
turning it to a simple knowledge object. Once two or
more of these simple knowledge objects are related
and tied by means of any authoring tool, they
conform a complex knowledge object. Finally, these
knowledge objects may be enriched with learning
and pedagogical metadata, allowing the definition
and management of learning objects, and making
possible to follow the learning process of students.
2.3 Knowledge Objects and
Annotations
Knowledge objects are high level entities extending
the gathered raw data with additional information
and annotations, which could be considered as added
knowledge. This knowledge includes the kind of
data it is (e.g., a picture), the associated building
lifecycle (e.g., design or construction), the
granularity of knowledge that is being used to
describe the object (e.g., subsystem or activity
level), and a global qualitative grading indicating
whether the object represents a good practice or a
bad practice and finally the annotations.
The annotations make explicit the relations
among the concepts defined in ArCo and the
collected data coming from real projects. The
annotations are the bridge joining the ideal instances
defined in ArCo and real examples of construction
stored in KOC. Besides these references, annotations
can contain additional information enriching the
knowledge object.
3 COMPOSITION AND
AUTHORING TOOLS
The initial version of KOC managed knowledge
ELEMENTS
SPACES
Functionalities
‐Stability
‐ Tightness
‐Habitability
‐ Security
‐ Location
‐ Resiliency
Elements’
Performance
Spaces’
Performance
SYSTEMS
SUBSYSTEMS
TASK/PROCESS
MATERIALS
TECHNICS
EQUIPMENT
WBS
¿WHATANDWHATFOR?
¿WHEN?
¿WHERE?
¿HOW?
ICSOFT 2009 - 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies
358

objects individually, not related to any other objects.
An evident KOC evolution is to define and manage
relationships among these “simple” knowledge
object, in order to conform knowledge objects of
greater conceptual level and finally store them into
the knowledge repository.
The generation of these new complex knowledge
objects could be a difficult and expensive task for
knowledge generators. In order to facilitate this
process, the authoring tools allow the creation and
incorporation of high level content to KOC
repository in a clear and simple way. These tools
improve the authors’ expressiveness, when
supported by ArCo.
This document presents three authoring tools
aiming to facilitate the work of content generators in
KOC, improving then the quality of education in
Architecture schools: a complex objects composer, a
constructive processes composer and a case studies
composer.
3.1 ArCo’s Based Complex Objects
Composer
The complex objects composer is an ArCo-based
authoring tool, allowing the creation of new
knowledge objects, using already existent
knowledge objects in KOC. The knowledge
generator issues a query to KOC using the concepts
in ArCo, as for example “Give me the knowledge
objects showing good practice techniques to build a
structural column”; the composer takes the results of
this query (the data and their annotations) and
generates a new PowerPoint document with them,
and also an initial annotation for the new knowledge
object; the author may edit this document to fulfill
his purpose and may edit also the annotation to
reflect the changes; finally the author may include
the new knowledge object into KOC repository. An
immediate consequence of using this tool is the
reusability of existing objects in the repository,
generating networks of semantic links among them.
The main purpose of this tool is the systematic
grouping of objects of simple knowledge sharing
similar characteristics (by querying its annotations)
in order to conform a high level object having
pedagogical objectives. This new object can be
presented in the class room or viewed with a WEB
browser, according to the teacher’s indications.
Another use of this tool could be to gather answers
to frequent questions that professionals have: They
will not to browse the whole repository searching for
the desired information.
3.2 Constructive Processes Composer
A constructive process is a sequence of
chronological activities leading to a finished
construction object. The constructive processes
composer is a tool to generate complex objects
grouping all these activities as a whole: it supports
the annotators in the input of multiple simple
objects, at least one for each activity, simplifying the
annotation process, because common descriptions
are issued only once. The individual information
associated to a given data includes its order in the
sequence, its duration, the involved personnel and
the qualitative grading of the activity. The composer
also generates a PowerPoint presentation with
pedagogical purposes, showing slide by slide each
activity carried out during the construction process.
The current implementation allows only constructive
processes for architectural elements like columns or
beams; further development of the tool will include
constructive processes of spaces like offices,
auditoriums, etc.
The purpose of this tool is to accelerate the
process of annotating constructive processes by
reusing the common annotations to each activity: all
of them concern a given element (a column, for
instance) and it is not worth to give this information
for each data. Contrary to the Complex Objects
Composer, this tool does not require that all objects
exists in KOC: Given n raw data representing a
construction process, the composer generates (n+1)
knowledge objects, n for the individual activities and
one for the construction process itself.
3.3 Case Study Composer
A case study is “a description of a situation from the
perspective of the protagonist" (Martinez, 1999),
serving as a metaphor to teach the student to solve
generic problems with the same kernel (Roberts,
2001). The case study composer allows the teachers
to define and structure their own case studies by
constructing a decisional graph of situations (nodes)
and the transitions (arcs). The result is a directed
finite deterministic and noncyclical graph. The
composer generates the case study as a pdf file
containing the general information about the case
study and the inventory of situations. This file can
be downloaded or browsed by KOC users.
The main purpose of the tool is to help the
teachers to systematically structure their knowledge
as case studies, taking advantage of existing contents
in KOC repository to illustrate the desired situations:
The author may use the queries facilities provided
AUTHORING TOOLS FOR KOC - A Knowledge Repository to Teach Building Construction
359

by KOC in his search of situations for his case study.
The case studies issued by the composer can be
extended, complemented or tied to other case studies
from other authors, leading to a collaborative
environment. By using this composer and the
vocabulary proposed by ArCo, it is possible to
capture and make persistent the teachers’ knowledge
in a reusable pedagogical format. The case study
methodology – and this composer in consequence -
promotes the Socratic pedagogy: learning by doing.
The composer also looks for the reuse of the
knowledge produced in real construction scenes in
the classroom, allowing the creation of networks of
relationships among pedagogical materials and
practical knowledge.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The KOC project has already shown great benefits
by its application in academic contexts. Its
contribution does not have to be limited by the effort
that represents for the authors the elaboration and
querying of high level knowledge objects. The
authoring tools try to solve this problem by helping
the authors to define and structure new complex
objects with high level of semantics, ready to be
used by student but also for software agents in the
Semantic Web.
Regarding the experience of KOC and
specifically the use of ArCo, it has been
demonstrated the effectiveness of using ontologies
for knowledge formalization and management, to
ensure communications among teachers and
students, and to make explicit the semantics of the
technical area in Architecture. Nevertheless the
potential use of ontologies can be also profited by
using them as a technology for data integration,
possibly among several instances of KOC or with
other systems.
As a whole, KOC has a good acceptance in the
academic environment; it has been presented in
several national and international conferences and
also has been awarded with international grants.
Starting the second semester of 2009 project KOC
will be used as a pedagogical tool in an
undergraduate course in the Architecture school of
the University.
Nevertheless, KOC could be improved in several
ways, including the addition of new functionalities,
the integration with other systems, its use in other
contexts and the internationalization of the
repository, teaching and learning tools, mobile KOC,
social KOC among others.
REFERENCES
Villazón, R. 2005. Sistema de Información para el Apoyo
a la Docencia y Gerencia del Conocimiento en
Proyectos de Construcción. Tesis de Magíster en
Ingeniería Civil. Bogotá : Universidad de los Andes..
Villazón, Rafael and Germán, Bravo. 2007a. KOC -
Manejo Ontológico de Objetos de Conocimiento en la
Construcción de Edificios. Revista Avances en
Sistemas e Informática. Bogotá : s.n., 2007. Vol. 4, 2.
Villazón, R., Bravo G., Cifuentes D., 2008. ArCo: An
Ontology for Architectural Concepts in Construction.
Orlando : Knowledge Generation, Communication and
Management: KGCM.
Wetherill, M., Rezgui, Y., Lima, C. & Zarli, A., 2002.
Knowledge management for the construction industry:
the e- Cognos project. Electronic Journal of
Information Technology in Construction. Vol. 7.
Construction Specification Institute, 2004. CSI Master
Format.
British Standards Institute, 1991. BSI 6100-2.5+ Glossary
of building and civil engineering terms. Londres.
Murray, T., 1999. Authoring Intelligent Tutoring Systems:
An analysis of the state of the art. International Journal
of AI in Education. Vol. 10.
González, J., Casals A., 2001. The Teaching Strategies of
Architectural Construction. Informes de la
Construcción. Vol. 53, 474.
Rodríguez, D., 1998. Estructura de división de trabajo
unificada para la construcción en Bogotá. Tesis de
Magíster en Ingeniería Civil. Bogotá : Universidad de
los Andes.
Vela, Maria, 2007. Documento de Seguimiento de
Procesos Constructivos. Bogotá : Universidad de los
Andes.
Martínez Sánchez, Amparo, 1999. El Estudio de Casos
como Técnica Didáctica. Innovación educativa 9.
Monterrey
Roberts, M.J., 2001. Developing a Teaching Case
(Abridged). Harvard Business School Note No. 9-901-
055. Boston : Harvard Business School Publishing.
Villazon, Bravo, Cifuentes, Vela, 2007. KOC: Objetos de
Conocimiento en Construcción. Asociación
Colombiana de Ingenieros de Sistemas. ACIS.
[Online] [Cited: Julio 13, 2008.]
http://www.acis.org.co/index.php?id=1031.
Villazón, Rafael and Germán, Bravo, 2007b. KOC -
Manejo Ontológico de Objetos de Conocimiento en la
Construcción de Edificios.. Segundo Congreso
Colombiano de Computación. Universidad Javeriana
Bogotá.
ICSOFT 2009 - 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies
360