Semantic Search in DDC CWICR Database

Business Case

Problem Statement

Construction cost estimation requires finding relevant work items from large databases. Traditional keyword search fails when:

• Users describe work in natural language
• Terminology varies across regions and languages
• Similar work items have different naming conventions

Solution

DDC CWICR provides pre-computed embeddings (BAAI/bge-m3, 1024 dimensions) enabling multilingual semantic search across 8 national bases (78,228 positions) plus the 30-market global base in 26 languages, with 48 PPP-repriced market catalogs per national base.

Business Value

• 90% faster work item lookup compared to manual search
• Multi-language: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese
• Higher accuracy by finding semantically similar items, not just keyword matches

Data landscape (2026)