Prophet: A context-aware framework for construction site applications

Construction sites are information intensive environments. The timely and satisfactory completion of any project depends on the accessibility of project information to the construction project engineers. Up to now, accessing this information at the point of work, where and when it will be most effective, has been difficult or impossible. This work describes Prophet, a context aware, framework for the development of information system that integrates context-aware applications to provide construction workers with on-site contextual data and services. Prophet is designed to take advantage of off-the-shelf portable computing devices and uses wireless network for communication between the users and servers that host applications and data. Prophet is designed to simplify the creation of systems that use the knowledge of user's context to help in managing the complexity of the construction data. This is accomplished by proactively tracking current resource requirements and proactively obtaining access to context-relevant information and services. This thesis describes the capabilities of the Prophet framework and provides a description of a sample implementation used to demonstrate the benefits of this approach.