Characterizing Perceived Data Sharing Barriers and Promotion Strategies in Civil Engineering

Despite the proven benefits of data sharing between different stakeholders participating in civil engineering projects, a systematic classification of data sharing barriers and strategies for promoting data sharing in the civil engineering domain is missing. The Data Sensing and Analysis Committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE DSA Committee) initiated an investigation to explore the current practices, barriers, and future vision in civil engineering data sharing. The approach is to conduct a literature review and interviews with domain experts to identify and classify data sharing barriers and strategies for promoting data sharing in the civil engineering domain. An online survey then follows, asking the participants having different job functions in various organizations (e.g., for-profit corporations, academic institutions) to prioritize five categories of barriers and three categories of promotion strategies summarized by the authors. The survey results show that: (1) most responders regard data sharing policy and data standard regulation as urgent needs; (2) different stakeholders prefer different promotion strategies due to they face different aspects of the data-sharing problem encountered; and (3) non-academic stakeholders hardly perceive the value of incentives for data-sharing research. The synthesis of these findings can guide the systematic design of three road maps that help advance healthy data-sharing systems in civil engineering: (1) policy road map, (2) technology road map, and (3) business road map. © 2021 Computing in Civil Engineering 2021 - Selected Papers from the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering 2021. All rights reserved.