thesis meeting

Over the last few weeks I have been going over my thesis structure and determining exactly what the nature of my all important second round of testing will be. During this time I've normally met with Mike and Fridays and Henry on Tuesdays. Last Tuesday we had a very interesting meeting between the three of us that went over the entire concept from start to finish.

One of the most important things that came out of the meeting was notion of the Project Information Cloud, a loosely joined collection of resources that could contain a number of Building Information Models and various other resources. The important aspect of this cloud was filtered, intelligent syndication of content between all participants. This filtered, intelligent syndication would achieve the aim of data relevancy that is of utmost importance when dealing with large quantities of data and communications.

It has been a while since I last posted, mainly because for the last month and a bit I've been busy preparing and implementing Reasonate within BBSc303. Consequently its been a pretty interesting time. It seems to be working out really well, I've got to grips with Rails (to the point that I cringe at the thought of having to do Java stuff) and almost all of the functionality has been implemented in an easy to use manner. Tagging and RSS have been implemented and introduced to the students whilst the project blogging aspect will come into play once the students form their project teams. Overall the students have picked up the ideas very quickly and some are really getting into the swing of things.

In previous meetings Mike and I have discussed how the system would operate (along with a lengthy discussion about Google Maps/Earth). One import issue Mike brought up was the role of versioning and how that would play out in the system. I think at this point there is a distinction to draw between the IT/programming concept of 'versioning' and one an architect may hold. In programming versioning is the process of tracking changes from a given point in time based on a set of very clearly defined parameters.

Over the past month Mike and I have had three meetings that for one reason or another I haven't documented. The weather has been very nice, usage of my Webmin Theme has taken off like a rocket (1,300 downloads and counting) and I bought the complete third and fourth seasons of the West Wing on DVD the other week.

Our meeting on the 20th of September primarily dealt with versioning and the problem of identifying when and how a change takes place. I have a post that is three-quarters written that deals with this subject so I will leave this topic for the time being. The next meeting covered the question of how whatever model come up with can be tested. Whilst the notion of making an interesting piece of software is worthwhile from a technical perspective through the academic lense such a folly is unjustifiable if the end result cannot be soundly analysed through critical testing.

Last Tuesday Mike and I met for a discussion on things. I was meaning to put an overview of what we talked about online sooner but it slipped my mind. Actually a far more interesting thing entered it - the home theatre system I bought the next day...

For the most part we discussed how the concept of 'rich and unobstructive' connections could be made a reality. Definitely the 'tagging' concept so well implemented in systems like Flickr would be a real benefit in such a system especially when it comes to the difficult task of categorising resources (text, images and CAD files) for searching. The ability for users to easy tag resources (be it theirs or others) would enable a degree of human searching not present in a contemporary model. Once use instance of this could be the client tagging product fittings they like and then having the architect place style tags next to them (i.e. postmodern, classic). Using these tags you could then pull slices out of the conceptual work such as 'classic, low-cost fittings that we (as in the client and architect) like'. Alternatively in a construction scenario the ability for the contractor to tag documents pertanent to a specific contractor would ease some documentation headaches (if I change this drawing who will be effected?).