An Effective Retrieval Approach for Documents Related to Past Civil Engineering Projects

During the practice of a public administration or a company, a large volume of documents are typically produced. The recent dematerialization efforts have been pushing the way for a digital form of these documents, so as to make their management more efficient and cost-saving. But, traditional document management systems entail many non-value adding activities, such as printing, transport and archiving these documents, making the retrieval of information extremely cumbersome, especially by users without a computer science degree. The research community is putting a lot of attention to realize effective and easy-to-use search capabilities over these large number of digital/digitalized documents. This paper investigates such a problem within the context of a document management system for past civil engineering projects, and proposes an applied solution to offer advanced document retrieval capabilities without demanding a strong background in computer science by presenting a proof-of.concept implemented within the context of the PROBIM project.