CONNET Software Center: A Section of the Construction Technology Park

Abstract

Within the frames of the European Union's Electronic Technology Transfer Network (ETTN), a pan-European virtual technology park — CONNET (CONstruction NETwork) was developed. CONNET consists of several information services for the construction industry. One such service is the Software Center — a comprehensive directory of software and on-line calculators. In the paper we describe the design issues, architecture, robot and agent based data harvesting, and information categorization issues related to that a service. We have found out that the industry lacks a general system for an industry wide indexing of information, but found existing standards in other domains, some of which were found useful.