A semiotic framework to understand how signs in construction process simulations convey information

Planning the production sequence for a construction project requires the combination and transfer of information and knowledge from a large variety of areas. To support this knowledge combination and transfer, construction process visualizations, also referred to as 4D CAD, have proven to be valuable tools. Within these visualizations, signs, such as icons, indexes, or symbols, are often used to visualize contextual information related to the different construction activities. To understand the mechanisms of how these signs meaningfully convey such contextual information, this paper introduces a semiotic framework consisting of semiotic concepts, their definitions and relations. This paper also illustrates the power of the framework by applying it for analyzing the signs used in two construction process visualizations.