Introduction

Ordering of BC information and knowledge has been subject of research and development for a long time. Somewhere in the sixties the Swedish SfB Classification and coding system started its advance. In the early eighties PDT research efforts tried to find a way to use computers for information and knowledge sharing. In the late eighties the CIB organised a conference that brought Classification and PDT together. From then onwards, researchers have tried to find solutions that improve the information and knowledge sharing capacity of BC, unfortunately still largely without success. This chapter analyses the developments and searches for reasons why BC could not apply technologies used successfully in other sectors of industry.

Over the years, many BC initiatives to improve information and knowledge handling have been started; not too many however have ended in commercial success. In the next sections a number of BC related development efforts will be described in some detail. The selection of development projects is somewhat biased towards the situation in the Netherlands. The underlying expectation is that other countries will show comparable efforts with more or less similar conclusions.