| Information management is critical to the success of a construction project. Because of the fragmentation of the construction industry and the diversity of construction projects, information sharing and collaboration are important measures to achieve successful project information management. As Internet based technology, such as the WWW (World Wide Web), e-mail, e-commerce, e-bid and e-BuilderTM, becomes ubiquitous, many practitioners in the construction industry believe that the Internet is the way to go for managing and disseminating construction information.; Currently Web-based applications have greatly relieved problems caused by geographical fragmentation; however these applications are not designed to deal with problems caused by functional fragmentation. Consequently, documents prepared using a third-party software tool cannot be directly used to retrieve related information in the viewer's local system.; This research treats a document as a "malleable frame" that can be adjusted according to user's needs and shows that a "malleable frame" system is more efficient in terms of processing construction documents than a standard system.; The research shows that a "malleable frame" system is technically feasible. The key is to have a neutral data format. Currently XML (eXtended Markup Language) related technology can be used to build such a neutral data format. In addition, many kinds of implementation tools, such as Java, DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) and COM (Component Object Model), are now available. It is inconclusive as to whether using the "malleable frame" system is more efficient than using the standard system. If document processing does not require local information or the required information is not available locally, the "malleable frame" system does not perform better than the standard system does. Nevertheless, if local information required by document processing is available, the "malleable frame" system performs at least as good as the standard system does. |
