Bridge maintenance decision-making is challenged by the “data-rich but knowledge-poor” nature of unstructured inspection and maintenance reports. A bridge maintenance knowledge graph (BMKG) construction framework is proposed, developed from a corpus of 275 inspection reports, to enable structured representation of engineering knowledge and decision support. A standards-aligned domain ontology provides semantic constraints for downstream information extraction and organization. Building on this ontology, a RoBERTa–BiGRU–CRF named entity recognition (NER) model is developed, achieving a precision of 90.8%, recall of 93.8%, and a micro-averaged F1-score (micro-F1) of 92.3%. Inter-annotator agreement for the NER annotations was quantified using Cohen’s kappa, yielding κ = 0.86. To avoid the cost of large-scale relation annotation, relations are constructed using interpretable, rule-based constraints. Through manual verification audit of randomly sampled relationship instances under a strict exact-match criterion (i.e., requiring exact matches for entity boundaries, entity types, and relationship types), an overall manual verification rate of 93.67% was obtained. Unlike existing KG methods that rely heavily on annotated data, the BMKG framework integrates ontological constraints with a rule-driven approach, prioritizing interpretability and reducing dependency on large-scale relation labeling. Consequently, the resulting knowledge graph supports semantic retrieval and visual exploration, enabling efficient disease-to-recommendation queries for refined bridge maintenance management.
Zhang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.