Download Project Summary - Loughborough University

Project Summary
TRACKSTORE
Extracting Knowledge from
Post Project Reviews
Studies have shown that post project reviews contain useful knowledge that could enable
organisations make better decisions on future projects. This twenty five months IMRC
funded project is looking at ways to extract knowledge from post project reviews and
enable organisations to learn from such knowledge. The research is investigating the
application of data mining techniques on text based reports.
Background
The Trackstore project began in February,
2007. It is a cross disciplinary project involving
the Civil and Building Engineering and Wolfson
School of Mechanical and Manufacturing
Engineering departments of Loughborough
University. The project collaborates with
industrial partners from construction,
manufacturing and services backgrounds.
The project in collaboration with participating
companies, accesses and examines post
project review reports made available,
reviews these documentation to understand
the PPR process of companies and to identify
key knowledge areas with the view of
developing ontologies for mining data from
the reports. The process is iterative and
involves the use of semi-structured interviews
of staff of collaborating companies, visits, and
workshops which are aimed at getting
feedback, establishing requirements and
criteria for actual data mining of the reports.
The results of the data mining will be made
available to collaborators for discussion and
validation. It is anticipated that the results will
lead to a recommended structure for PPR
reports to facilitate data mining procedures,
increased utilisation of review reports for
decision making, better dissemination of
review reports to relevant actors across the
organisation and an increase in knowledge
extraction processes on post project reviews.
Project Plan
The project has six work packages as
detailed below:
ƒ
To understand the post project
review processes in construction and
manufacturing organisations. This will
involve investigating the
collaborating organisations’
procedures used to obtain and
collate data, the storage and
disseminations techniques currently
used.
ƒ
To review post project review reports
available in terms of content and
format, in order to determine the
most appropriate manner of
deciphering and analysing the
reports.
ƒ
To develop ontologies appropriate to
specific domains.
ƒ
To experiment with data mining on
the post project reviews available to
identify significant trends and
patterns, and establish the most
appropriate mechanisms and
bottlenecks in the process.
ƒ
To review the findings of the
knowledge discovery and data
mining with collaborating companies
to determine the mechanisms for
improving the process.
ƒ
Dissemination of results
For more information please visit:
http://trackstore.lboro.ac.uk.
Contact: [email protected]
Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, United Kingdom.
Telephone: +44-(0) 1509 222891 Fax: +44 (0) 1509 223981