Achieving and measuring flexibility in project information retrieval

Because of the diversity of people, organizations and activities involved in the management of construction, there is a need for great flexibility in the way in which project information can he presented. This paper describes how relational database technology can be used with integrated database design methodology to develop a flexible means of information retrieval. An implementation of a database of this type, for the purposes of research, has used project data from a real life project. The testing of the database has been of its ability to enable flexible information retrieval. The results show a significant improvement in flexibility measured on an ordinal scale. The paper thus shows how to gain greater flexibility in informat ion retrieval for basic retrieval forms. It also presents a methodology by which flexibility can be measured and compared. It concludes by speculating on the consequences of extrapolating the results of the study to more complex forms of information retrieval.