Conceptual Role Semantics for the Interpretation of Construction Concepts

The generation of concepts in the construction industry involves the interpretation of syntactically defined symbolic notations, such as logic, frames, semantic networks, natural language, and of other forms such as visual representations. These notations are deliberately organized to define concepts. The understanding and characterization of concepts into symbols and other forms of representations are addressed for sharing the concepts within the construction industry community. Models are based on symbols that are intended to refer to certain entities of the world with properties and relations embedded within them. Models group a set of relations that characterize concepts with the purpose of being shared and understood by members of the community. However, models suffer from the limitation that logic and the symbolic notations have, they cannot capture the richness of the phenomena of the world in their syntactic notation. Instead of inquiring within the paradigm for the right "choice" for representing concepts, this research aims to direct attention towards the process of interpreting a representation, as well as, that of translating a concept from the agent's mind into a representation. Interpretations are the source of the divergence for asserting the correct meanings of the representations. The central idea is to investigate the role of `similarity' relations that express semantics in construction representations. This investigation searches for valid reasons that explain the divergence in the understanding of information when actors in the construction domain generate representations to communicate concepts and, at the same time, when the actors perceive the representations that are used to interpret the concepts.