An XML metadata approach to seamless project information exchange between heterogeneous platforms

A three year Esprit project - ProCure - is ultimately aiming to take a significant but achievable step forward in the application of available information and communication technology (ICT) to the large scale engineering (LSE) construction industry. The ProCure consortium consists of five industrial partners supported by four associated research and expert partners. The project combines leading expertise from three member states to support ICT deployment by three industrial collaborative groups, i.e. UK, Germany and Finland. The basis of the project is in the partners' belief that sufficient ICT is now available to achieve deployment with care, in real projects, with an acceptable risk of failure. This paper presents work undertaken within the project to investigate the various metadata standards that exist in order to define a minimum metadata set based on these standards for the implementation of two demonstrators for XML based automated document exchange between a simulation of a corporate document management system and a simulation of a collaborative construction project Web site.