DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE REPOSITORY FOR RESEARCH IN CIVIL ENGINEERING

Abstract

Since the establishment of NUST Institute of Civil Engineering (NICE), the FYPs and MS and PhD theses available on SCEE library are not presentable in a productive way. The NICE students and faculty face difficulty, while initiating the research, in analyzing where is the concentration or lack of research and where should be the focus of future research. Another problem was the lack of communication between NICE academia and the construction industry. There has been no platform where industry and academia could be linked and facilitate each other. The objective of this project was to classify FYPs and MS and PhD theses from scratch to make it easier for academia to understand the research gap in respective fields of Civil Engineering and synchronize academia and industry through a feasible platform. To present the FYPs and MS and PhD theses to the students in a way that they may access the FYPs and MS and PhD theses easily and they may get to know about the need of future research, it was necessary to classify FYPs and MS and PhD theses based on Knowledge Areas. The knowledge Areas of each Civil Engineering Department (e.g., Construction Engineering and Management, Structural Engineering, Transportation Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, and Water Resources Engineering and Management) are defined through research study and consultation with the Head of Departments of the respective departments of NICE. Then, the FYPs and MS and PhD theses of each department are classified newly with the help of NICE E-thesis and counts of FYPs, and MS and PhD theses are concluded based on Knowledge Areas of respective fields. The newly classified data is presented on a web portal. The web portal is also used as a tool for synchronization of Academia and Industry. NICE students and faculty may access the portal with the academic purpose and academia and construction Industry may facilitate each other through this platform.