Enhancing multi-disciplinary collaboration through semantically rich representation

The growing complexity of the built environment requires increased professional specialization to master each one of the many issues involved in designing buildings. This specialization is transforming the construction process into a highly de-centralized operation, involving an ever-growing number of collaborating professionals. Habitual modes of collaboration among the participating professionals suffer from low-grade communication, leading to misunderstanding and resulting in design and construction errors, cost and schedule overruns, and ultimately, dissatisfaction of the users with the performance of the finished products. This paper explores the roots of misunderstanding in multi-disciplinary design and presents a solution based on explicit representation of reference and frame-of-reference through three connected databases and a set of inference tools.