Anticipating reuse: documenting buildings for operations using web technology

This research explores the feasibility of web technology as a means for delivering building information to better support facility operations. Our research proposes just-in-time (JIT) facility documentation as a pragmatic solution to the limitations of current as-built documents, allowing more effective reuse of building information. Our investigation addresses four issues: (1) what building information is needed for facility operations; (2) how the design and construction team can improve the format for delivering the building information to facility operators; (3) how current web technology can store and deliver facility information in support of operations; and (4) what is the mechanism of documenting building information using the web technology. veyed literature, interviewed members of design and operations teams and reviewed current initiatives of industry and software vendors to identify problems with current practices. We also surveyed promising web technologies and conducted experiments to determine how these technologies could help to solve the problems. We constructed a conceptual framework of JIT facility documentation as a solution to current information fragmentation problems. We developed a prototype of the JIT document system to demonstrate a “proof of concept” by using current web technologies such as Autodeskʹs DWF, Microsoftʹs Active Server Pages, VB and Java script, and Access database to develop the prototype system. By dynamically composing HTML pages in response to task-specific requests, our prototype enables easy access and integration of a variety of building information to support facility operations.