Summary: |
Numerous documents of diverse nature are involved in the construction process. Some of them such as building codes, examples of technical solutions, computation rules, define the legal context of a project. Others like technical specification documents or bills of quantities are generated by the engineering activities and often have a contractual importance. Quality of the laters may be measured by their coherency with the regulation, with the documents previously approved, but also by their coherency with the construction project itself through the absence of errors, omissions or redundancies. Once elaborated, these documents should also prove ability to be used by various actors with specific needs or requests. We describe here our approach to manage the production of these documents in tight connection with the engineering entities describing a construction project. Such a connection is based on a conceptual model of the project through its various systems and entities as proposed within the STEP framework. Such a connection relies also on a formal representation of the documents, practically SGML Document Type Definitions, and on a set of document templates linked to the construction project model and from which the project documents will be derived :from a global set of documentary items, we will only retain the relevant sections towards a given project. Then we present a software platform we develop to operate such an approach. This platform encompasses various modules taking in charge the elaboration of project data models according to the Express-G methodology, supporting the production of SGML DTDs and associated documents templates, providing some frames and facilities to link the project model and the document templates. |