Online Knowledge Base for Sustainable Military Facilities and Infrastructure

One of the biggest barriers faced by proactive installations is identifying first steps to take in order to achieve early wins in their quest for sustainable buildings. Contributing to this barrier is an overwhelming proliferation of information available on sustainable building practices, leading time-constrained project stakeholders to throw up their hands in frustration. To effectively incorporate sustainability, personnel need access to the right kind of information in the right format for the right person at the right time. To address these challenges, Georgia Tech Research Institute is developing an online knowledge base that generates situation-specific checklists for capital project sustainability, using easily available information supplied by the user to filter out everything but the strategies that are most likely to succeed. The target audience for this tool is installation-level facilities personnel, including facility users, planners, project managers, architects and engineers, operations and maintenance personnel, and environmental staff.

The interface to the online knowledge base reduces the amount of information decision makers receive down to a page or two in checklist form, and uses the mechanism of hyperlinks to allow users to drill deeper if they need more information on any particular topic. Additional information available through drill-downs include examples of other projects that have used the same strategy/technology, spec language, links to relevant databases, and other technical information. Users who don’t want to become experts on any particular strategy can simply print out the checklist and use it as a reference as the project progresses. Potential building strategies are coded in terms of costs and benefits, risk and reliability, and value and difficulty to help users prioritize what strategies may work best for them. This project is sponsored by the Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory and the Region IV Department of Defense Pollution Prevention Partnership and will provide a basic framework to structure and deliver information on sustainable projects to help military design and construction professionals decide how to implement sustainability in their situation, while capturing their decisions to serve as an institutional memory or knowledge base to provide information for other stakeholders of future projects.

Resources:

Jones-Crabtree, Anna J., Pearce, Annie R., and Chen, Victoria C.P. (1998). “Implementing Sustainability Knowledge into the Built Environment: An Assessment of Current Approaches,” 1998 IERC Conference Proceedings, Banff, BC, Canada, May 9-12. – This paper describes the initial data analysis that was the impetus for designing an online knowledge base.

Bosch, Sheila L. and Pearce, Annie R. (2003). “Sustainability in Public Facilities: Analysis of Guidance Documents,” Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, Special Issue on Facilities Design and Management, 17(1), 9-18. – This paper is a second analysis of data in the form of guidance documents to identify the underlying structure of data for built environment sustainability (to be uploaded)

Pearce, Annie R. and Vanegas, Jorge A. (2002). “A Parametric Review of the Built Environment Sustainability Literature,” International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, Special Issue on Sustainability and the Built Environment, 2(1), 54-93. – this paper provides a third perspective on organizing structure for built environment sustainability information (draft)

Pearce, Annie R. (2002). “An Online Knowledge Base for Sustainable Military Facilities & Infrastructure.” Region IV Department of Defense Pollution Prevention Conference, Atlanta, GA, June 27. – This presentation provides an overview of the goals and solution for the online knowledge base (to be uploaded).

For more information, contact Dr. Annie R. Pearce at annie.pearce@gtri.gatech.edu.