Information Modelling for Improving Communication in ... - Cumincad

Information Modelling for Improving Communication in Design and Construction Khaldoun ZREIK1, Rudi STOUFFS2, Bige TUNÇER2, Saban OZSARIYILDIZ3 and Reza BEHESHTI3 1 Research Group in Informatics, Image, and Instrumentations, I3 (GREYC), Caen University, France 2 Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, NL 3 Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, NL Keywords:

collaboration, digital design media, information modelling, visualisation

Abstract:

Globalisation and international competition force the AEC industry to change its work and collaboration practices. The traditional way of working is evolving into a more integrated process, and the traditional use of “synchronised passive” files and paperbased communication is being replaced with ICT based solutions. Currently, the AEC community is at an intermediate stage, i.e., it is shifting to “online” electronic documents. In this paper, a new concept called “eDocument” (eDoc) is introduced. The eDoc project is a cooperative effort in order to develop and implement a generic dynamically structured, multimedia, multi-channel, and multimodal information system as a means for communication in AEC projects. The major innovation in the concept is that, although it uses a repository, the focus is on the “logical and physical” specifications of the eDoc concept as a shared tele-workspace that is accessible through multiple platforms.

1

RATIONALE AND BACKGROUND

The Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) industry has a rich history of collaboration, even within a competitive market. Globalisation and internationalisation, however, supported by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), are forcing the industry to change, especially in the way industry members work and collaborate. In a struggle to become more agile, traditionally well-defined and understood control hierarchies and relationships are making place for more ad hoc and intricate collaborative processes that are not as easily planned and controlled. At the same time, the traditional use of “synchronised passive” files and paper-based communication is being replaced with ICT based solutions, and information processes in design and construction are becoming more integrated.

Digital Design Computational processes are becoming more data and information intensive. Not only do amounts of information grow, also the nature of the information becomes more diverse, be it qualitative, quantitative, graphical, numerical, or textual. As data and information are collected and stored at a continuously growing pace, these are becoming far less accessible. Faced with difficulties of searching and selecting the appropriate information for a task and retrieving this information in a comprehensible form with respect to this task, these growing amounts of information become less and less useful. As a result, support for information management is receiving more and more attention. Research activities in AEC project information management can be roughly divided into two groups (Rezgui and Debras 1996): a model-based approach, and an integrated document management approach. In the model-based approach, all information is collected in a single integrated (product) model from which documents can be produced almost automatically through queries. However, because of the complexity of such models, their general lack of flexibility, and their impact on the work processes, the adoption in the AEC industry is difficult to achieve (Zamanian and Pittman 1999). Turk and Scherer (2002) provide an overview of recent research results in the area of product and process modelling in the AEC industry. Product models are primarily concerned with the representation of an accurate description of the object under design or construction. Recent research attempts to widen the scope of such models to other information that is of concern in the design or construction process, but does not specifically relate to a direct aspect of the product. By virtue of the complexity of these processes, and the uniqueness of the products, the nature of this information cannot all be known a-priori. Both the kinds of information, i.e., concerning the content and context, and the types of information, i.e., concerning the forms and formats, vary widely. The integrated document management approach is essentially document-based, treating the individual documents as objects that are organised and related according to various attributes. The purpose is to offer a flexible organisational framework and enable an easy retrieval of documents. This approach has resulted in a generation of Web-based Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMSs) (Björk 2001) and Web applications for design project management that provide facilities for organising, viewing, and redlining drawings and images (Burchard 2001). It can be said to be compatible with current work practices but offers little support for improving collaborative processes. Especially the emphasis of EDMSs on documents as self-contained files inhibits the ability to access this information at higher levels of summarisation, in correspondence to a concept of interest that may not necessarily be expressed explicitly in the organisational structure. To this extent, methodologies of viewing shared documents in the form of hierarchies, lists, hyperlinked documents, or tables increasingly illustrate the limitations of such presentations. Instead, an advanced representation that captures the information structures built during collaboration, combined with appropriate visualisations of these structures, can empower the partners in the analysis and understanding of the collaborative processes and increase their effectiveness during collaboration (Tunçer et al. 2000). 64

Information Modelling for Improving Communication As information becomes more extensive and less defined, it is no longer as easily comprehensible. Information must be selected, organised, and presented in a manner conform to the needs of the person requesting this information and the activity it will play a role in. This is compounded by the varying nature and type of these needs and activities, which may even conflict at times. At the same time, human communication is becoming increasingly electronic and formalised (e.g., e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)). However, the integration of the various communication services with electronic data and information management and exchange is still far from realised. As information increasingly originates from communication instead of data processing activities, the characteristics of the information are shifting towards volatility and flexibility, making the information not easily captured in a single form or format. This has important consequences on the modelling of this information. Information is no longer defined only by a set of data, or objects. The semantic dimension of the information becomes more than ever predominant. Information production and adaptation today are based on an open set of online interactive tools. Exchanging information using different means of communication has increased the complexity of the information modelling process. Considering the context in which information is acquired or received is a necessity. The product becomes represented by a message, which can be represented by a different set of information depending on the means of transferring this message. At the same time, the message can have only one meaning; a message has to be mono semantic, or unequivocal. The complexity of this problem arises when the different communication channels are not well fitted to deal with the same kind of media. This is very important in design where emphasis is placed on graphics and images as media for transferring information. Thus a message becomes a hyper-message that can be represented at least by three hierarchical levels of abstraction: decision (text, voice), argumentations (text, voice, and simple graphics) and details (text, images, arrays, etc.). It is not a problem of data format adaptation; it is a problem of real time multimedia information reengineering.

2

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

We aim to design and develop a generic dynamically structured, multimedia, multichannel, and multimodal information system as a means for communication in AEC projects. The major innovation in the concept is that, although it uses a repository, the focus is on the “logical and physical” specifications of the concept of electronic documents (eDocuments) as a shared tele-workspace that is accessible through multiple platforms. Such a system must consider the technological environment of the user. Depending on the presence of a wireless network or adapted environment, the system can manage the different levels of the hyper-message. If the user only has access to a cellular phone he or she will only get the upper level of the hyper-message, i.e., the decision or the most important information. If the user has access (by infra red or 65

Digital Design bluetooth, or otherwise) to a PDA he or she will be able to get more argumentations. If the user has access to more processing power, a larger display and the necessary software support, more and more of the information, including detailed information, can be part of the message. For this reason, an “eDocument” modelling system has to consider all these new requirements (Figure 1). In this context, the term “eDocument” (eDoc) covers all new aspects of electronically exchanged documents, i.e., multimedia, multimodal, dynamic and composite. eDocs are considered as a means of both professional and private communication. In this context, a single document contributes only one element in a communication process and cannot be interpreted independently of the context of communication and of other elements preceding it in the process. As such, at each level of abstraction, an eDoc might be defined as a composition of information entities that reflects on a particular view by the author and is embedded in an information space consisting of a collection of information entities, their metadata, and their relationships. This specification of an eDoc emphasises both the information aspect of the communication element in its relation to the information space, and the document as a specific composition defined by the author for a targeted audience. Most current approaches to support communication and information exchange focus on one or the other. In considering developments in e-activity fields (e.g., e-learning and e-working), we can observe the impact of such approaches to eDocs, in particular, in relationship to the electronic workspace concept and on the perception, understanding, and practice of this concept. For instance, considering a workspace offering access to eDocs embedded in a common information space, browsing the information space may lead to a marking of selected entities reflecting on a given intent. Organising and composing these entities within the workspace will define a new eDoc that can be presented to others in a communication process.

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GENERAL APPROACH

The definition of eDocuments is highly conceptual. As such, it does not invalidate any existing technologies enhancing the use of documents in communication and collaboration. For example, the hypertext/hypermedia paradigm breaks with the linear structure of traditional documents and allows the viewer to browse document information freely within the hyper-structure. As another example, document standardisation approaches decompose documents into basic information entities according to standardised types and structures, allowing the viewer direct access to those types and entities that he or she finds important at that time. Therefore, product models, standards, and other technologies (e.g., XML, agent technology) may serve to concretise the definition of e-documents.

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Information Modelling for Improving Communication

Context

Design project management Impacts of e-activities development Design communication process shifting

Workspace shifting

Application

Browser

Data warehouses: information modeling repositories

Content Type

Workflow shifting: eDocument-based management system

Doc

WAP

Editor

Web

Data Graphic Image Table Text Sound Natural voice Digital voice

Figure 1 Diagram relating the design project management context, the main application components of an implementation of the eDocument concept, and exemplar communication contexts and content types. The grey-highlighted parts constitute the main concern of the eDoc project.

3.1

The Conceptual Model

The initial ideas of application are based on an important aspect of product models, that is, the separation of three semantic levels of information: definition, representation, and presentation (Luiten 1994). The definition of a product contains product information on shape, material, behaviour, etc. in a neutral format. Neutral here means independent of the computer applications used. The representation of a product contains part of this neutral information in a format suited for computer manipulation. The representation is derivable from the definition. The presentation of a product contains part of the neutral information in a format suited for human interpretation. The presentation is derivable from the representation and definition. For communication, ideally only the definition needs to be exchanged, because the other two can be derived and created on the fly. In addition to the three levels (definition, presentation, and representation) related to products, the application development can be further grouped into semantic and 67

Digital Design syntactic levels (Figure 2). The semantic representation level bridges the gap between product databases and the application. Objects are either persistent or transient; relations among objects, such as association and aggregation, are modelled as part of the data logic. The syntactic representation level covers the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the GUI logic used to map (present) objects onto the GUI, and the interaction that helps to define how to interact with the GUI. In summary, the neutral product representation and presentation serve as bases of the eDoc concept. The application generates the eDoc, which can be represented in different contexts such as the Web, WAP, etc (see also Figure 1).

Figure 2 Three semantic levels of information with respect to a product: definition, representation, and presentation; two levels with respect to application development: semantic and syntactic. As mentioned before, the eDoc is an abstract container (Figure 3). It may contain other eDocs or refer to others. eDocs are used in a certain context during the life cycle of design and construction projects. Keywords help to cluster and search eDocs. Since an eDoc is accessible through different media, the path of the eDoc adapts itself accordingly. A page is a physically representable document that has content. The content can be in any form, e.g., a 3D shape, voice, or text. The content is adaptable to different platforms, for instance, by summarising long texts or by adjusting the resolution of images. The envelope contains the relevant information about a page. Information on the creator, receiver, and version are attached to pages and documents.

3.2

The Semantic Model

An eDoc necessarily reflects on the author’s view. The embedding of this eDoc into a larger information space enables anyone else to adapt the eDoc to his or her personal needs. For this purpose, the user must be assisted in searching the information space for related or alternative information entities. In a rich communication process, the numerous eDocs are tightly related and create a rich information space. Such a space can be queried independent of the composing eDocs in pursuit of new eDocs. 68

Information Modelling for Improving Communication An eDoc can be said to define a language of expression. From a representational point of view, the entities and relationships recognised within the eDoc form the vocabulary of this language. Collecting eDocs into an information space then defines a meta-language, the vocabulary of which is defined by the composition of the component vocabularies. A new eDoc can be considered as defined by a new language and respective vocabulary. According to this vocabulary, semantic and syntactic entities will be included into or excluded from the structure, resulting in a subset of entities and relationships. This subset forms the new eDoc. Both collating eDocs into a single structure and slicing this structure into new eDocs requires a comparison and mapping of the respective languages and vocabularies (Stouffs and Krishnamurti 2002).

Figure 3 An eDoc Model Searching information structures and repositories is commonly based on semantic queries, e.g., keyword matching, full text searches, etc. In the context of different media and communication channels, the syntactic form of the information also becomes important, e.g., text versus images versus sound. While various forms may be adaptable to different platforms, e.g., by summarising long texts or by adjusting the resolution of images, such conversion may not always be available, e.g., visualising complex graphics on a cellular phone or PDA. In general, searching for information is dependent both on the semantic query and on the technological context of the user. 69

Digital Design An integrated product model commonly includes an encoding of the semantics within this same model. Instead, distinguishing these semantics in a separate structure, e.g., as a semantic network, induces flexibility and extensibility into the information model and its implementation. It also avoids the imposition of a fixed frame of reference. Information entities can be freely associated with these semantic entities. The semantic structure can be extended or adapted throughout the information modelling process, without requiring any corresponding modification of the syntactic information structure or the application. It also supports the conception of a message with many different forms and only one meaning; the form of the message can easily be changed without altering the associated meaning. The semantic structure may be derived from an ontology or concept language developed for (processes within) the AEC industry (e.g. Woestenenk 2000), or from a typology, as is common in the architectural design domain (Tunçer et al. 2001). The evolution of this semantic structure may be driven by the communication process and automated from it. By analysing incoming information for concepts and key semantic components, and their relationships, information entities can be automatically associated to the semantic structure, while the structure is updated to adapt to the communication processes and participants in the project. Such analysis can be supported using pattern recognition mechanisms for text (e.g. Greenberg 1999) images (e.g., Barrow and Tenenbaum 1981) and line drawings (e.g. Chase 1989; Krishnamurti and Stouffs 1997), and computational intelligence techniques (e.g. Jang et al. 1997; Jennings and Wooldridge 1998), including data mining. While there has been a lot of research into the field of image and pattern recognition, remarkably few applications of this research in the AEC domain exist. We do however expect these technologies to mature and be able to serve this purpose.

4

CONCLUSION

The concept of eDocuments emphasises the communication aspects of AEC processes. Recognising that various achievements have been made in recent years with respect to product modelling and standardisation, it is also a fact that these have had relatively little effect so far on the work practices of the AEC industry as a whole. This can be partly ascribed to the volatility of cooperative relationships between industry members from project to project and to the common lack of formal processes that are shared among industry partners. On the contrary, communication is becoming increasingly electronic and formalised and can serve as a catalyst for the evolution of other practices and processes towards ICT-based solutions. Linking communication processes to product models and other information modelling supports for AEC processes requires information models that recognise the need for various abstraction levels, for mechanisms for adapting content to various platforms, and for evolutionary semantic structures. Together these support the concept of a message as an eDoc with many different forms and only one meaning. The eDoc project offers the opportunity to integrate knowledge and techniques from 70

Information Modelling for Improving Communication various research areas related to information modelling, including product modelling and standardisation technologies, information abstraction techniques, computational intelligence techniques for information networking, meta-visualisations of processes and information, ontology development and evolution as a means for structuring information, data mining and agent technologies etc., towards the evolution of the electronic workspace as a personalised space in a cooperative environment designed for the AEC industry.

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