A successful construction business is a knowledge business. And knowledge must be managed effectively to be used efficiently, especially in a complex project-oriented business such as construction, where skills acquired and lessons learned on one project need to be applied to the next. A holistic approach to knowledge management (KM) is taken in this book to incorporate all of the relevant themes, tackling technological, socio-cultural and organisational issues, with the creation of value as a focus throughout. Information is drawn from a broad range of sources to explain core theories and provide guidance on practical application. Topics covered include: * changing business relationships in a knowledge economy; * knowledge creation processes and theories; * data, text and knowledge mining techniques; * the learning construction organisation; * future technology for knowledge management. Written by the authors of the first EU-funded KM research project in the field of construction, this textbook is uniquely well-researched, and is the perfect introduction to KM for students across the built environment. It is also a crucial guide to the topic for practitioners.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2007, held in Paris, France in June 2007.

The 31 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 110 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language for database query processing, email management, semantic annotation, text clustering, ontology engineering, natural language for information system design, information retrieval systems, and natural language processing techniques.

A successful construction business is a knowledge business. And knowledge must be managed effectively to be used efficiently, especially in a complex project-oriented business such as construction, where skills acquired and lessons learned on one project need to be applied to the next. A holistic approach to knowledge management (KM) is taken in this book to incorporate all of the relevant themes, tackling technological, socio-cultural and organisational issues, with the creation of value as a focus throughout. Information is drawn from a broad range of sources to explain core theories and provide guidance on practical application. Topics covered include: * changing business relationships in a knowledge economy; * knowledge creation processes and theories; * data, text and knowledge mining techniques; * the learning construction organisation; * future technology for knowledge management. Written by the authors of the first EU-funded KM research project in the field of construction, this textbook is uniquely well-researched, and is the perfect introduction to KM for students across the built environment. It is also a crucial guide to the topic for practitioners.