Towards an Information Seeking Environment for Distributed Building Related Data: Introduction to a System Concept Based on a Shared Ontology

During the building life cycle continuously data regarding the building is produced and collected by various disciplines. Especially in early phases of design concept development information needs may occur, which require manual information seeking within the collected data. The availability of user interfaces which allow visual navigation within an integrated view to the distributed data as well as the usage of parallel searching strategies would help a planner to go through several alternative solutions very quickly. Based on a shared conceptualization explicitly represented in a shared ontology the information physically spread among several partial models can be integrated into a global view. Great efforts have already been made in defining shared conceptualizations for the AEC/FM sector which can serve as an integration basis. Utilizing the software agent technology along with concepts evolved within the Open Hypermedia research an open "engineer-friendly" information seeking environment can be established on top of an ontology-based integrated view. This paper examines several related research work and describes an overall system concept of such a navigation layer.