Lamine Mahdjoubi

1 INTRODUCTION The increasingly bigger amount of data in infrastructure project cost, its inconsistencies in structure, and the variety of formats, even within a single organization, makes the comparison process, the analysis, and the decision-making tasks difficult and unreliable.

1. Introduction The lack of standardization in railway infrastructure cost projects leads to data being stored in different formats and structures. This is greatly amplified when comparing data from different organizations [1] This issue makes the decision-making process more difficult and unreliable since it does not leave room for comparison and analysis [2]. Data extraction and data mining are technologies that offer great potential in this field since they can provide many benefits.

1. Introduction Much effort has been put into developing standards for structuring construction cost and quantity information to streamline the process of estimating project costs, obtaining quotations, and enabling comparison and analysis [1]. Historically, information was broken down by building trade, with the dominant UK standard being the Standard Method of Measurement (SMM), which was first introduced about 100 years ago.