MODELING BUILDING PROJECT INFORMATION Bige Tunçer , Rudi Stouffs Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology ABSTRACT: Building projects are expressed in a variety of documents presenting different abstractions of the building. Web-based project management systems are gaining ground as environments for organizing and managing these documents. However, such systems lack the possibility to distinguish and relate different components within these documents. By adopting a uniform language, e.g., XML, as a common syntax to represent these abstractions, documents can be interpreted and broken up into components in order to achieve a richer information structure. These components within and between abstractions can be related, and these relationships added to the representation. The result is an integrated structure of components and relationships, represented in a uniform way, offering new views not inherent in the structure as created by the original abstractions. This paper focuses on some of the representational issues involved in the process of interpreting, breaking up, and relating abstractions. KEYWORDS: abstraction, document management system, representation, information structure, XML 1. INTRODUCTION Building projects are expressed through a variety of documents such as drawings, diagrams, models, pictures, and textual information. These documents serve as a medium for communication among the project partners and between the different disciplines involved. From a collaborative perspective, each document reflects on the author’s role as well as on the intended meaning. From a representational point of view, these documents present different abstractions of the project, e.g., geometry, structure, context, and functional organization (Schmitt, 1993, 39). Short of imposing an integrated product model, a ‘document-based’ approach for managing these abstractions is commonly used. Treated as individual entities, the documents can be organized and related according to different categories and attributes. However, it is not possible to distinguish and relate different components within these documents. Doing so, however, would provide for a richer information structure offering new possibilities for accessing, viewing, and interpreting this information. To overcome this drawback, we propose the adoption of a modeling language, e.g., XML, as a common syntax to re-represent these abstractions. In this way, documents can be interpreted and broken up into components. These components within and between abstractions can then be related, and these relationships added to the representation. The result is an integrated structure of components and relationships, represented in a uniform way. This paper focuses on some of the representational issues involved in the process of interpreting, breaking up, and relating abstractions. We illustrate the potentials of this Construction Informatics Digital Library http://itc.scix.net/ paper w78-2000-937.content