Global project documentation and communications using HTML on the World Wide Web

This paper presents the use of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) as the foundation for storage and retrieval of construction project information. HTML has gained wide-spread popularity because of the WWW (World Wide Web) on the Internet. HTML is a simple mark-up language for handling mixed media types, such as text, images, sound, and videos in the same document. It provides a basic, but effective, navigation tool, which allows the user to click on a word or a sentence to invoke other information items. Due to its simplicity and popularity, HTML has emerged as the standard for implementing homepages on the WWW. Through the WWW, data files can be transferred between remote sites and displayed using browsers specific to the file types. Construction project information typically contains diverse media types, such as text (daily logs), images (site photos), databases (project schedules), sound (narratives), and videos (site walk-thrus). Construction project information, stored in HTML format, can be easily shared by project participants at different geographical locations using the WWW.