Web-based material science data sharing platform for highway engineering

Abstract

Construction materials account for significant part of highway construction cost. Performance and cost of the materials should be considered comprehensively. However, most performance data of the materials are kept in literatures, research reports, standards and specifications. It is hard to collect these data of different forms from correspondingorgranizations. So, in practice, these data are not used in material selection of highway engineering at all. In order to apply the valuable data into practice, in this work, performance data of the materials are gathered from various sources. All the data are processed to a standard form provided by the system. Thus, the users of related areas can access the data easily. In order to make the system more friendly to the end users, full-text search engine is integrated in the system. In this work, metadata of each material performance data record is kept in the database managment system. When each record is added in the system, lucene is employed to create full-text index of the data. Thus, both metadata search and full-text search of materials data are available. The system has been used in practice for ten months. According to the practical application results, the users can easily share their data and access them. The data are also presented intuitively and vividly. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.