Using a Semantic Network for Structural Health Monitoring

Infrastructure is aging continuously. Especially for critical structures like big buildings, bridges industrial plants and so on assuring safety is very important. Even for structures that are part of our cultural heritage risk assessment and lifetime management attracts more and more attention. The economic and scientific sector concerned with these problems is called “Structural Health Monitoring” (SHM). A good support of the activities mentioned above would help a lot and it would lead to better, more intuitive assessable systems which at the end will help avoiding fatal disasters. Institutions working in the field SHM usually produce large amounts of data. The main reason for high data production is so called “live monitoring”, whereby sensors are installed on the target-structure which are permanently recording the building’s state. Equipping this industrial sector with a possibility especially to manage and to publish this huge amount of data e.g. the measurement results mentioned before in a comfortable and appropriate way is a great aim. Main aspects of the subject area SHM are system Identification, damage determination and localisation, safety assessment and maintenance management for various types of structures. The system explained in this contribution is called VCDECIS. It is a knowledge based system designed especially for the scientific field SHM. Its main components are semantic network, search engine and web platform. The aim of the system is to comfortably manage an institution’s content and to add knowledge like connected technologies, authorship and so on using the semantic network.