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This paper aims to identify the challenges of Hong Kong and overseas developers in project management when undertaking real estate projects in China, and then focuses on how to mitigate and solve the problems. The proposed solution is about a concept of using the IT tool “web‐based construction project management system” (WPMS) to help assuring projects success in China. The study reported in this paper focuses on how to implement WPMS to manage construction projects in China considering the overall situation, limitations and Chinese culture.

Case studies and interviews were adopted to identify the main reasons why experienced Hong Kong developers have apparently been outperformed by the capital‐deprived local developers in China. SWOT was applied to analyse project failure factors. Afterwards, 49 web‐based construction project management software systems were reviewed to identify their features, their client expectations, the technology propagation modes, and the most emphasized functions in the construction stage. An in‐depth case study was adopted to test the hypothesis that web‐based construction project system could help Hong Kong developers to properly manage their projects in China.

Cooperation and coordination difficulties among participants caused by long geographical project distance and remote management control were identified to be the main causes of project failure. Web‐based construction project management system was proved to be efficient and effective in cross region project coordination and monitoring. Since property development business is a continuing and non‐one‐off activity, the investment of a tailor made WPMS is really good value for money. Concerning the low readiness of business partners in China, an encouraging pattern with more self‐incentives should be considered for achieving a win‐win‐win situation as an essential tactic as proposed in this paper.

How to evaluate the benefit of using WPMS in quantitative method remains a challenge. Future research could compare the project with WPMS and without WPMS.

The case study of the application of a tailor‐made web‐based project management system (named ICPMS) by one of the major developers in Hong Kong has demonstrated that the headquarters in Hong Kong is able to get timely first hand project information, facilitating timely decisions and ensuring project success. Thus, the adoption of WPMS is a worthwhile investment for overseas developers undertaking real estate development projects in China.

This paper puts forward the concept of overseas developers using WPMS to help assure project success in China. Chinese culture and other limitation factors were considered for the first time in WPMS implementation in the construction industry. How to make the implementation of WPMS to successfully overcome such barriers is illustrated based on this empirical study.

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for integrating construction supply chain in order to resolve the data heterogeneity and data sharing problems in the construction industry.

Standardized web service technology is used in the proposed framework for data specification, transfer, and integration. Open standard SAWSDL is used to annotate web service descriptions with pointers to concepts defined in ontologies. NoSQL database Cassandra is used for distributed data storage among construction supply chain stakeholders.

Ontology can be used to support heterogeneous data transfer and integration through web services. Distributed data storage facilitates data sharing and enhances data control.

This paper presents examples of two ontologies for expressing construction supply chain information – ontology for material and ontology for purchase order. An example scenario is presented to demonstrate the proposed web service framework for material procurement process involving three parties, namely, project manager, contractor, and material supplier.

The use of web services is not new to construction supply chains (CSCs). However, it still faces problems in channelizing information along CSCs due to data heterogeneity. Trust issue is also a barrier to information sharing for integrating supply chains in a centralized collaboration system. In this paper, the authors present a web service framework, which facilitates storage and sharing of information on a distributed manner mediated through ontology-based web services. Security is enhanced with access control. A data model for the distributed databases is also presented for data storage and retrieval.

There have been major efforts to develop the technology for integrated construction environments and the mechanisms needed to improve the collaboration between construction professionals. Evidently, the development and usage of such an environment is a complicated task. The two issues that can be among the main contributors to this are: the development of the technology and its effective implementation. These two issues are addressed separately in this paper. The paper first explains the approaches of sharing project information, followed by a review of a recent project in this area, the result of which is a distributed integrated construction environment based on the industry foundation class (IFC), capable of supporting a number of construction applications. This environment is capable of supporting a construction team to work collaboratively over the internet. It then discusses the difficulties facing the successful implementation of such environments in construction organisations. This is addressed within the context of two management models for effective implementation of IT: the resource‐based model and the Nolan model.

A web site usually contains a large number of concept entities, each consisting of one or more web pages connected by hyperlinks. In order to discover these concept entities for more expressive web site queries and other applications, the web unit mining problem has been proposed. Web unit mining aims to determine web pages that constitute a concept entity and classify concept entities into categories. Nevertheless, the performance of an existing web unit mining algorithm, iWUM, suffers as it may create more than one web unit (incomplete web units) from a single concept entity. This paper presents two methods to solve this problem. The first method introduces a more effective web fragment construction method so as reduce later classification errors. The second method incorporates site‐specific knowledge to discover and handle incomplete web units. Experiments show that incomplete web units can be removed and overall accuracy has been significantly improved, especially on the precision and F1 measures.

Integrated project delivery (IPD) is highly recommended to be utilised with building information management (BIM), specifically with BIM level-3 implementation process. Extant literature highlights the financial management challenges facing the proposed integration. These challenges are mainly related to the IPD compensation and the conventional cost control approaches that are not consistent with IPD principles. As such, this paper presents an integration of several methods to support automating risk/reward sharing amongst project parties thus enhancing IPD core team members’ relationship.

The literature review was used to highlight the challenges that face the IPD-based cost management practices such as the risk sharing/reward sharing amongst IPD core team members and potential methods to bridge the revealed IPD gap. A framework was developed by integrating the activity-based costing (ABC) – as a method to analyse the cost structure – and earned value management (EVM) to develop mathematical models that can determine the three main IPD financial transactions (i.e. …) fairly. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed system, a real-life case study was used, in which, promising results were collected in regard to visualising the cost control data and understanding of the accumulative status of the project cost and schedule for team members.

A centralised cost management system (CCMS) for IPD is developed to enable the IPD cost structure as well as automating the risk-sharing/reward-sharing calculations. This system is linked with a web-based management system to display the output of proposed risk-sharing/reward-sharing models. Moreover, a novel grid is developed to show the project status graphically and to respect the diversity in core team members backgrounds. In addition, the case study showed that the proposed integration of different methods (ABC, EVM, BIM and web-based management system) is interoperable and applicable.

This research presents a comprehensive solution to the most revealed challenges in cost management practices in IPD implementation. The outcome of this research contributes to the body of knowledge through presenting new extensions of the EVM to be used with the IPD approach to calculate risk/reward. Moreover, the implementation of the proposed tools such as centralised cost management system (CCMS) and CCMS for IPD web system will enhance/foster the implementation of the IPD in conjunction with BIM process.

A three year Esprit project – ProCure – is ultimately aiming to take a significant but achievable step forward in the application of available information and communication technology (ICT) to the large scale engineering (LSE) construction industry. The ProCure consortium consists of five industrial partners supported by four associated research and expert partners. The project combines leading expertise from three member states to support ICT deployment by three industrial collaborative groups, i.e. UK, Germany and Finland. The basis of the project is in the partners’ belief that sufficient ICT is now available to achieve deployment, with care, in real projects, with an acceptable risk of failure. This paper presents work undertaken within the project to investigate the various metadata standards that exist in order to define a minimum metadata set based on these standards for the implementation of two demonstrators for XML based automated document exchange between a simulation of a corporate document management system and a simulation of a collaborative construction project Web site.

This paper describes efforts by the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, to develop effective strategies with which to develop students’ skills in communications and information technology (C&IT). The strategy adopted was to develop these skills within modules that tackle traditional earth science subjects rather than devise a specific skills development module. Two modules were utilised: Geohazards and the Malta Fieldcourse, which specified the achievement of C&IT skills as key objectives. The results of the first year’s experiment were surprising. Students on the Geohazards module, who received extensive practical instruction in C&IT skills, did not demonstrate appreciable attainment of C&IT skills. In contrast, many students on the Malta Fieldcourse, who received no practical C&IT instruction, created Web pages for assessment. The reasons for these results were evaluated and alterations made to both modules, mainly in respect of the learning environment. Results in 1998 were dramatically improved and demonstrate the importance of creating and maintaining an experiential learning environment to encourage students to develop and demonstrate C&IT skills.

The objective of this paper is to propose the use of transaction data, hedonic model and internet‐based technologies to provide potential home buyers and sellers with instant and online property appraisal services by real estate‐related firms.

Hedonic price model is performed to estimate the price index of individual housing estate. The values of the coefficients of the attributes may change in response to a changing environment. A professional judgment should be given by appraisers on time intervals to re‐run the hedonic price models, if needed. Once the algorithms have been updated, authenticated users can connect to the system via a secure socket layer. They can browse and search the valuation reports by entering search criteria of premises into the system that filters the results instantly according to the request of users, and a detailed asset valuation report will be displayed in the browser.

This sort of online services is believed to save consumers' time, by offering timely property appraisal services that facilitate property transactions.

Currently, local large property developers, agencies and surveying firms are still relying on manual processes of providing selected transaction data via the web to their prospective customers. The system proposed and developed as described in this paper is an automatic and self‐learning system that produces reliable and authentic results based on large quantity of historical transaction records. The professional judgments of appraisers add flavor to the final valuation of properties. As well as providing information to individual buyers/sellers, the system is most suitable to investors who own a large portfolio of properties as the total capitalization of the portfolio can be computed easily and quickly. REITs are examples of these portfolio owners.

Building intranets enhances organizational communication and information access. Intranets can be used to achieve the goals of business process reengineering and organizational innovation. This paper discusses the implications, benefits, concerns and challenges of building intranets for organizational innovation.