
The Construction Knowledge Task Group (CKTG) reconvened on 1st July 2019. We met at the office of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in the amazing Leadenhall Building.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the CKTG was established because a lot of construction industry knowledge isn’t affecting practice on the ground. The group includes representatives of construction industry institutes, associations and other organisations. And I am acting as the representative for CIAT.
The task group’s purpose is to optimise the creation and dissemination of documented, practical, applicable knowledge. In doing so, we can enhance productivity and support compliance. You can find out more here.
Construction industry knowledge
The meeting focused on the governance of the group. And we heard feedback from the three CKTG workstreams:
- Indexing construction knowledge
- Finding construction knowledge
- Accessing construction knowledge
Delegates discussed how project teams look after their in-house information. Small groups within practices often end up working around finding information, as well as how they share it.
The role of AI
The most interesting topic was the magical use of AI to build databases of construction industry knowledge. Such databases would provide information quickly and effectively.
Everyone experiences the same issues, but the scale is where the issues are and how you ensure people can still find the correct answer, even if they don’t know quite what they are looking for or where they should look.
British Standards (BS)

We all know it starts with Building Regulations (and the second tier documentation that goes with them) and the named British Standards, but most of them are behind paywalls.
The key question is surely this:
Where British Standards are concerned with life critical building elements, shouldn’t they be accessible for free or minimal cost?
Designing Buildings Wiki
Off the back of the CKTG, some of the work being done by Designing Buildings Wiki is really positive and interesting.
A very simple custom search engine has been prepared. It can return results from 68 key industry websites. This has been created to test the usefulness of, and identify potential problems with, a custom search engine. Their search engine can be tried here.
That’s all for now, but I’ll keep you posted on what happens next!
And if you missed part 1 it’s here
