The INNOVance Lexicon: Organisation of terms and concepts about construction products

The construction sector is also a knowledge-intensive domain, in which effective and unambiguous communication and knowledge sharing are, at the same time, both essential yet difficult to accomplish. This is primarily due to the several professionals interacting and facing situations involving diverse resources, processes and activities. Each of them brings a different background and perspective, often generating poorly integrated information. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) are crucial for ensuring completeness, consistency and quality of information. Despite the international trend to encourage the development and use of controlled vocabularies, especially classification systems, until recently in Italy the national coordination policy has not been effective enough. This article describes the first national attempt made, the INNOVance Lexicon that collects and organises knowledge about construction products. It combines taxonomic, terminological and semantic aspects of knowledge and it is a reference language to support information exchange and sharing in collaborative context.