Towards a domain-specific knowledge intelligent information system for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Dimitrios Makris 1,2 , Ioanna Ravani 1,2 , Georges Miaoulis 2 , Christos Skourlas 2 , Pascale Fribault 1 , Dimitri Plemenos 1 1 Laboratoire Méthodes et Structures Informatiques – MSI Faculté des Sciences, Université de Limoges 83, rue d’Isle, 87060 Limoges cedex, France, Tel: (+33) 5 55 443 69 74, Fax: (+33) 5 55 43 69 77 Email : makris@msi.unilim.fr, ravani@msi.unilim.fr, fribault@msi.unilim.fr, plemenos@unilim.fr 2 Technological Education Institute of Athens Department of Compute Science Ag.Spyridonos St., 122 10 Egaleo, GREECE Tel: (+30) 2 10 53 85 312, Fax: (+30) 2 10 59 10 975 Email: demak@teiath.gr, jrav@teiath.gr, gmiaoul@teiath.gr, cskourlas@teiath.gr Abstract Architectural design knowledge is a particularly challenging information domain to represent. Building modeling deals with the complexity of the early phase of architectural design. During that phase, architects use visual and verbal descriptions in order to express their ideas. A declarative process could capture the nature of the early phase of architectural design. The motivation of this work was to combine the representation of information as it is used in declarative scene modeling and architectural conceptual design. We propose a Declarative Knowledge Framework for Architecture-oriented Building Modeling (DKABM) to incorporate the conceptual design of scenes with domain- specific knowledge. We illustrate how this framework is adapted in MultiCAD, an information system based on declarative modeling. We result the declarative representation of scene with architectural concepts and rules through the DKABM, called Normalized Declarative Building Model (NDBM). A specific kind of building has been used to test the integration capability of the implemented framework. Keywords: domain-specific knowledge, declarative modeling, building modeling, architectural design, knowledge management, computer-aided-design, intelligent information system. 6th International Conference 65