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CSTB is a public research establishment in the construction sector. CSTB employs about 830 staff including 450 engineers, researchers and experts in building science and building technologies and advanced ICT. CSTB core business covers four main fields: research, technical consultancy, quality assessment, and knowledge dissemination. In ICT, expertise covers the modelling, representation, sharing and exchange of building lifecycle information; distributed architectures; web services, knowledge management, development and management of ontologies and taxonomies, business and process modelling, and prototyping of web-based e-Work services to improve construction process efficiency. CSTB is an experienced participant and project leader in many national and European collaborative research projects, like the IST ICCI cluster for construction and the IST ROADCON roadmap. CSTB is deeply involved in other relevant initiatives such as the prodAEC Network, the eConstruct project, and the CEN/ISSS eConstruction workshop. Currently CSTB devotes great attention to the semantic matters: (i) development of bcBuildingTaxonomy, a construction specific taxonomy to represent products and support some facets of the e-commerce; (ii) development of the e-COGNOS ontology and the e-COGNOS Ontology server, to help promoting the adoption of Knowledge Management practices in construction; (iii) co-ordination of the FUNSIEC project, to evaluate the feasibility of developing a framework of reference to support and promote the use of B&C Semantic Resources (SRs) currently available in Europe, (iv) development of the FUNSIEC Semantic Experience Centre, a Web portal to help educating the sector regarding the use and benefits of SRs.
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