Thesis overview and methodology

Analysis

The first part of the thesis analyses the current situation and the available technologies.

Chapter 1 is the introduction, it introduces the BC industry, poses initial research questions and provides an overview of the thesis.

Chapter 2, problem analysis, analyses the current situation in the BC industry and improves one of the initial research questions.

Chapter 3, analysis of current information and knowledge sharing in the Building-Construction industry, analyses the history of methods for information and knowledge structuring and suggest research opportunities for improvement. The goal is to analyse what works well currently, what lacks and what needs improvement.

Chapter 4, Analysis of new applicable Next Generation Internet technologies, analyses the applicability of the NG Internet as a vehicle to improve the information and knowledge sharing capacity of BC. The goal is to extract the technologies that can be most useful in improving BC's value-adding performance.

Research questions

Chapter 5, revisiting the research questions, revisits the initial research questions. The goal is to take the analysis of the previous chapters and prepare it for the solution concepts chapter.

Solution and implementation

Chapters 6-8 propose a solution concept and implement and test it.

Chapter 6 presents the solution concepts proposed to help solve the problem.

Chapter 7, technical prototype implementation, discusses aspects of the technical implementation of the instruments. The goal is to provide the technical background of the prototype applications that were built to demonstrate and test the solution concepts.

Chapter 8, case studies, evaluates the solution concept by means of two case studies where the instruments discussed in the previous chapter have been applied.

Conclusions

Chapter 9, conclusions and recommendations, presents the conclusions of the research and gives recommendations for further research and development work.