Summary: |
A building project demands and generates an enormous amount of data, As a building designprogresses from a vague program to a detailed design, its data progresses from inexact -approximate areas and locations of rooms, alternative building forms - to exact - type, finish andlocation of each door hinge, exact polygonal representation of each roomThe traditional building professional has traditional media and tools for storing, retrieving,displaying and modifying building data: Construction documents, specifications, buildingmodels, parts catalogs, sketches and one's memory do an effective job. But as we move (areforced?) away from traditional to a more computer-dependent building design, traditional toolsand media are no longer useful. Whether computer analogues for traditional tools and media aredeveloped or whether computers revolutionize the building industry, sketches, drawings,specifications and models are being replaced by data-structures, data-bases, rules, facts, andhyper-structures.This paper presents an approach to formally analyzing the structure and relationship of buildingdata for the purpose of defining a CAD building database. A building and its site are assumed tobe a collection of systems. A generic system is defined as a framework for specific site andbuilding systems. The paper introduces and uses the NIAM graphical notation for binaryrelationship conceptual modeling. The paper will also report on the application of this approachto the definition of a standard for exchanging building product data (PDES/STEP) |