Ontology Based Design for Similarity Discovery in SYMBAD Project

The SYMBAD (Similarity Based Agents for Design) system is a project developed to aid architectural design team members to share knowledge used in stand design. Stands play important role in promoting a company image, projects its presence and emphasizes the corporate identity in events and fairs. The processes and problems in stand projects are quite common and can be easily found in other design situations. From conceptual design to the construction of a final product, a stand project passes through many hands, each one adding bits and pieces until it is completed. The physical distance, difficulties in communication and cultural aspects make designers interact less than necessary, generating problems in all phases of the design activities. The SYMBAD project uses an ontology based framework to improve process awareness in a design activity. Based on the knowledge kept from previous projects and similarity aspects, agents can identify possibilities for reuse and provide information to help the design team to built new stands using past materials and ideas. Through a constructed ontology and collaborative features agents can produce global awareness, to facilitate later steps and optimize the process as a whole. In this paper we present some of the junctions and architecture aspects, as well as some of the implementations choices made for this project