ITcon Vol. 6, pg. 69-82, http://www.itcon.org/2001/6

Focused Sharing of Information for Multidisciplinary Decision Making by Project Teams

submitted:June 2001
revised:September 2001
published:November, 2001
editor(s):B-C Björk
authors:Kathleen Liston, Ph.D. Candidate
Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, USA
email:kathleen@listons.net

Martin Fischer, Associate Professor of Civil and Env. Eng. and (by Courtesy) Computer Science
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4020, USA
email:fischer@stanford.edu

Terry Winograd, Professor of Computer Science
Stanford University, CA 94305-9035, USA
email:winograd@cs.stanford.edu
summary:Today's electronic and paper-based approaches to the sharing of project information do not scale to the information sharing and interaction challenges of multi-disciplinary project team meetings. The inability to share and interact with information easily and effectively is one of the biggest bottlenecks in using electronic (online) information for collaborative decision-making. Through scenarios from recent construction projects, this paper summarizes existing approaches to the sharing of information and assesses their effectiveness in supporting multi-disciplinary decision-making by project teams. It then discusses recent research into interactive information workspaces where, with minimal software overhead, participants can share information that is relevant to a particular context to establish a common focus. We believe that the construction community can make significant progress quickly in leveraging existing and future investments in information infrastructure if it not only pursues information sharing through the use of product models but also formalizes the focused sharing of information and separates information interaction and view control from software services and underlying data as outlined in this paper.
keywords:Interactive Workspaces, Product Modeling, Human-Computer Interaction, Decision Support, 4D Modeling
full text: (PDF file, 0.557 MB)
citation:Liston K, Fischer M and Winograd T (2001). Focused Sharing of Information for Multidisciplinary Decision Making by Project Teams, ITcon Vol. 6, pg. 69-82, https://www.itcon.org/2001/6