Help Desk

Info. Locations | FAQ | Join CONNET | CONNET Services

What is in the Help Desk?

This help desk serves three purposes:

1. For users of CONNET the help desk provides points of reference for general information and a place to ask questions.
2. For organisations interested in setting up complementary CONNET services, or a national gateway, it provides a procedure to achieve this goal.
3. For all users it provides a repository of frequently asked questions regarding CONNET.

Help on Searching

To perform a search key in a word or words in the box above.

Type individual words to find all sites which contain those words in their Internet home pages.

Use double quotes to search for a phrase e.g. "built environment".

The boolean search operators AND can be used. By default any two words in a search term have an AND between them.

All individual words are stemmed so that, for example, searching for construct will identify construct, constructs, constructed, constructing, construction, etc.

Other Locations for Information

There are several places inside CONNET where information is available. The following topics are covered:

• Services in CONNET: identifies all the services which are available in CONNET, and links to a brief description of the functionality of each service type.
• Technology Observatory: provides a point of reference for IT for the Built Environment, both background and resources.
• Viewing your profiles: allows a user to view all the profiles they have established in all CONNET services they have used. The user may also manage their profiles from this point, modifying or deleting what they have previously specified.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Currently, no questions have been asked.

Join CONNET

Collaboration between electronic information systems for the construction industry could be usefully achieved at several different levels.

For a minimal level of effort, some of the options described below could bring a wider audience to existing systems, enabling users of European and national systems to find your sites. The users of CONNET-enabled services will gain through access to an enhanced set of information. Your publications, national organisations, specialist equipment etc. could be brought to the notice of the users of CONNET systems in the 7 countries currently participating in I-SEEC. For those countries without their own system this would be a fast way of getting one set up.

1. National Gateways

1. Establish a new national gateway
2. Integrate an existing national gateway into the CONNET network
3. Link exchange promotion - provide URLs of related systems for hard-coded links to CONNET/I-SEEC systems

2. CONNET Services

1. Establish and link a new type of service to the European Gateway
2. Integrate an existing service with the CONNET network - implement Data Structures or API calls in national systems to allow compatibility with CONNET/I-SEEC systems and to allow queries to be passed between systems and results returned to the originating system
3. Host a CONNET service - provide access to data for Technical Information Centre, Who's Who etc. services to enable these data to be incorporated in or hosted by existing CONNET/I-SEEC services

3. Publicity Opportunities

1. Link exchange promotion - provide URLs of related systems for hard-coded links to CONNET/I-SEEC systems
2. Web site index - provide national URLs of importance for the CONNET News crawler (especially English language sites)
3. Software index - provide information on national calculation software tools of importance for CONNET software service
4. Professional Bodies index - provide information on national organisations for CONNET Who's Who service

4. Development and Research Opportunities

1. Infrastructure specification working group
2. Data Model specification working group – review and comment on Data Structures for CONNET/I-SEEC services
3. API specification working group – review and comment on APIs for CONNET/I-SEEC services

New CONNET Services

One of the fundamental assumptions of this service, and the CONNET initiative, is that there is benefit from bringing together as wide a range of organisations as possible. To this end we welcome the establishment of new services in other countries or for other markets. We also welcome connections with existing services in the countries they serve. There are several ways forward for those who wish to set up a similar service, they are summarised below:

• Compliant interfaces: for an existing system the simplest approach is to provide an interface compatible with the CONNET specifications. This is detailed in full through the API specification.
• Development with common models: a replicated service could be developed using the data models and API specifications as a starting point. These are available for interested parties.
• Re-use of existing service: the database, software, and machinery used to provide the majority of existing services can be re-used to provide similar services for any other interested party.
• Lease of existing service: the software created for the majority of existing services can be leased to other interested parties.
• Technical consultancy: the development teams for these services are available to provide technical consultancy on any issue related to service development.

CONNET (Construction Information Service Network) has been developed under the EC initiative ETTN (European Technology Transfer Networks) in DG III. Since the EU project was completed several of the participants have joined together to form a European Economic Interest Group to maintain and further develop construction-related online information services. We are always interested in talking to organisations who wish link existing or develop new types of services that are compatible with CONNET's aims (see Contact Us).

The current members of the CONNET EEIG are:

• Auckland UniServices Limited, New Zealand
• BRE Projects Limited, UK
• Building Information Foundation, Finland
• ByggingarÞjónustan ehf, Iceland.
• Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
• Istituto per le Tecnologie della Costruzione, Italy (previously named ICITE)
• Rannsoknastofnun byggingaridnadarins Rb (Icelandic Building Research Institute), Iceland
• Univerza v Ljubljani, Faklteta za gradbenistvo in geodezijo (UL-FGG), Slovenia
• ZRMK, tehnoloski institut za graditeljstvo, d.o.o., (Building in Civil Engineering Institute Ltd), Slovenia
  

What is Available from CONNET?

The CONNET European and National sites provide a range of services of benefit to the development and maintenance of internationally connected services. Services include:

• Gateway service: CONNET provides a gateway through which all connected construction services can be identified and accessed. It provides general information about services and about IT in construction in general.
• Inter-service communication: CONNET provides services with the means to identify and send queries to their equivalent in other countries or other domains.
• Across-service communication: CONNET provides services with the means to identify and send queries to other types of services which provide related information types.
• Security: CONNET offers and utilises certificates to ensure secure communication between all services inside the CONNET network.
• User profiles: CONNET provides a central user profiling system to handle consistent profile information for users across all the CONNET compliant services they use.
• Classification systems: CONNET provides databases of common classification systems and provides methods to manipulate and utilise various classification systems within a service.
• Tracking: CONNET provides centralised tracking of service use to provide use statistics to all connected services.
• Standards repository: CONNET manages and controls the standards used for interoperability between services. This ensures a single neutral co-ordination point for all standards. It also ensures a single body which can check and control compliance with the published standards.

CONNET Services

There is a core of major information services which comprise the base offerings from any nation. CONNET encourages the establishment of comprabale information services within any nation which joins the initiative. The current services running across European nations are as follows:

	bookshop
	waste exchange
	software
	news
	who's who
	suppliers
	best practice
	manufactured products

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