thesis

I am having issues making small but consistent formal writing progress, up until now it has been in fits and bursts. To provide extra 'motivation' Henry will be monitoring my daily progress my tracking the daily word count I produce. My target for Christmas is 30,000 good words (which is probably about 45,000 bad words) and given where I am at today that works out to be approximately 350 words every day (including weekends). You can watch my progress too, just subscribe to this Google Calendar where I'm keeping a daily tally:

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So far so good but it is early days yet...

Given all the attention to interoperability within the AEC industry over the last ten years you would have thought Airbus would have had a handle on the idea. Unfortunately it would appear that even though they are using Catia for the bulk of their design development work the significant format differences between version 4 and 5 plus management mishandling has resulted in the delay of the A380 and millions (if not billions) of dollars of losses. It would appear that even though Boeing's aircraft may not be as imagination inspiring as the A380 their CAD processes are a lot sounder.

Over the last few weeks I have been concentrating on more formal writing hence the limited number of blog entries. Once this formal writing reaches a point where I feel comfortable with the structure and content I will most probably publish it up here, until then hold tight. In the meantime I have come across a couple of very interesting links related to tagging and folksonomies that are worth remembering.

Folksonomy Generation

David Weinberger has a very interesting post and comment thread named 'What is a folksonomy anyway?' where he tries to come to terms with exactly what a folksonomy is and how it comes about. It is commonly agreed that a folksonomy is a set of user generated tags assigned to related pieces of content, but the real question is what role does the process of tag creation have to play in the establishment of a true folksonomy?

I first read about and subsequently looked into Structured Blogging and Microformats a while back but a recent podcast on IT Conversations by Marc Senasac reminded me of them. Marc is CEO of PeopleAggregator, a company that is trying to successfully bring together and market more buzz-words under a single umbrella than most people care to know about.

Structured Blogging

Structured Blogging is an initiative intended to bring some structure to the world of blogging. It seems like when-ever people start doing unstructured and completely random things there is always another group who wish to impose some form of framework to which they do it. Structured Blogging is attempting to infuse a little more intelligence into your average blog, mainly by first asking the blog author to give their blog post a little description (is it ramblings, a review or a podcast?). This description is recorded as a Microformat so that search engines and other such tools can do more intelligent things with blog entries than simply read them.

The September 15th edition of the AECBytes email newsletter it featured a very good article from Patrick Aragon from Adobe. Entitled Reinventing Collaboration across Internal and External Project Teams, the article focused on findings from collaboration research conducted by Harris Interactive (on behalf of Adobe). The research concentrated on how Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) professionals collaborate digitally. The research was undertaken using an online survey undertaken during April of 2006.

From the perspective of my own research the most significant finding from the article is that 72% of respondents collaborated outside their office location. This is a clear indication that the concept of a consolidated ‘office space’ where all design/construction activity takes place is eroding (or perhaps never existed). As a consequence the value of centralised, firewalled project databases or physical documentation repositories is brought into question because if project information cannot be accessed when and where it is needed what immediate value does it hold to the process? Of course these repositories are required for long-term reference and legal purposes but in the interests of moving a project forward it would appear participants are limited to the project knowledge they can personally recollect or store in a mobile device (be it laptop, phone or briefcase).

The other interesting finding was the collaboration file format breakdown as it illustrated the overwhelming majority of exchanged data is by and large straightforward text, numeric and image data stored in Word, Excel and jpeg formats respectively. The other very significant format used by participants is PDF which typically contains textual data but is capable of transferring any printable information (from pixel-based image to vector-based plan) making it difficult to classify. What all these formats have in common is that they are not semantically rich or typically considered part of a greater Building Information Model. In fact from the study it would appear that only approximately 21% of participants use some form of 3-dimensional computer model as a means of collaboration whilst 2-dimensional CAD representation is slightly higher at approximately 38%. These findings highlight the following issues of relevance to my thesis:

1. Given the emergence of Writable-Web tools like blogging, image sharing and the so-called Google Office (and equivalents) what is the future for the bulk of AEC collaboration?

2. Considering the majority of AEC collaboration takes place in formats not suited for integration with the Building Information Model does this validate the need for a looser, broader concept for dealing with design project information in an intelligent manner?

The future role of the Writeable-Web in AEC collaboration

The underlying motivation behind adoption of blogging and online photo-sharing is that these tools make very simple the publishing, consumption and feedback processes. Prior to these tools sharing information over the Internet took place primarily via email. Whilst email has the capability to ‘just work’ it is not as useful for sharing complex or time-sensitive data and requires recipients to be explicitly stated when the message is created. Consequently these issues add collaboration barriers and potentially limit the target audience.

The last couple of months have been difficult as I have tried to focus on the problem of satisfactory testing the Project Information Cloud concept. This process has required I nail down my aim and hypothesis so that whatever methodology was decided on would ensure the overall ambitions and specific requirements of the thesis were met. Initially my aim focused on improving the access, timeliness and relevance of the information available to project participants however this posed problems around the semantics and testability of ‘relevance’. Relevance can mean many things to many people and is also dependent on time. Something relevant to me now may not be relevant later but that same thing could be very relevant to you later on but of completely no value at the present. Consequently determining a reasonable and sound methodology for testing relevance was proving to be difficult.

Swoogle is a semantic search engine project by the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland. They have taken a useful approach by ripping off Google's interface so that new users understand how to use the tool from the very beginning. Unfortunately the major limiting factor of the experience seems to be the results page. Rather than creating human readable snippets of information below each of the links the results simply output a snippet of the RDF code from the returned file. RDF is difficult for computers to understand so asking people to make sense of a brief quote is expecting the possible. As a consequence it is difficult to meaningfully interrogate the results in order to find content that is most relevant to you, in fact in practice the value of the returned results seems almost zero.

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.

Recently two useful articles on BIM have been posted. The first from Cadalyst is a general overview of the BIM product space providing a brief overview of all the major vendors offerings (with links to more info). Light on content but still a useful point of reference none the less. The second is a more in-depth article that reviews the AIA Integrated Practice 2006 conference. The interesting idea put forward in this piece is that architects are not really using BIM tools to model the complete building model but rather are focusing on the drawing aspects of it (referred to as DIM - Drawing Information Model). Conversely it is proposed that the only people currently using BIM for its proper purpose are contractors who are less worried about documentation and more concerned about nuts and bolts (literally).