The world's first website to adopt the Specification for Discoverable Construction Knowledge

Designing Buildings Wiki has become the world’s first website to comply with the Specification for Discoverable Construction Knowledge. Coming just a few weeks after publication of the specification, this move signals its importance to the industry in bringing knowledge into the digital era and making it more easily accessible. This will help improve industry competence and regulatory compliance and will give practitioners better access to best practice, research and innovations.

Developed by the Construction Knowledge Task Group, the specification represents the first stage in developing a ‘BIM for knowledge’ – allowing construction knowledge to be standardised across the industry so that it can be more easily searched, filtered, managed, manipulated and curated - whatever its source. BIM has already standardised construction industry data and information, now construction knowledge can start to catch up.

Dr Gregor Harvie, Director of Designing Buildings Wiki said: “The specification was so easy to adopt it took just 2 hours to apply 19 new metadata fields to 10,000 knowledge resources. This will make our knowledge more discoverable by practitioners so they can find exactly what they want faster. Other publishers are currently considering how to follow our lead, to make all industry knowledge consistent and easy to access.”

The Construction Knowledge Task Group is now working to develop tools that will allow publishers and practitioners to search and use knowledge from different sources in a single step, cutting out the need to go into and out of multiple sites and wade through irrelevant content to find exactly the right piece of knowledge. Tools can also be developed to integrate construction knowledge into the project environment, so practitioners can access it from where they are, rather than having to go and look for it.

The specification can be adopted by anyone publishing knowledge that might be useful to construction industry practitioners. This includes traditional publishers, but also consultant organisations, contractors and suppliers, who all contribute to the rich knowledge landscape that supports the industry.

Harvie said: “Organisations spend a lot of time preparing knowledge, but practitioners are not always aware of it, and can’t always find it. This new specification is the first step in changing that, and we are calling on the whole industry to get behind it and apply it to their knowledge.”

The Specification for Discoverable Construction Knowledge is free to access. It is an easy-to-apply metadata standard available at http://purl.org/dck/spec.

There is guidance about how to apply the specification here.