Application of “Big Data” to Engineering Properties of Hong Kong Soils

In recent years, big data is becoming a very powerful tool in processing extremely large amount of data in such fields as finance, industry, engineering, etc. For geotechnical engineering, large number of laboratory and in-situ tests (mostly SPT) have been carried out in the past few decades. Laboratory testing includes soil classification and most importantly three major engineering properties: shear strength, compressibility and conductivity. In order that these data forming the big data can be useful in engineering design, a lot of processing/analysing works have been carried out and these indicate that soil type is the most dominant parameter affecting all engineering properties. Within each soil type, there are some secondary factors such as fines content, dry density, etc, which have only a secondary effect on these properties. Another dominant primary factor is SPT, which will affect most importantly the shear strength.