Knowledge Sharing, not MetaKnowledge. How to Join a Collaborative Design Process and Safely Share One’s Knowledge.

The present paper is drawn from an on-going research on collaborative design, which has been pursued by this Research Unit for a number of years. The proposed model, the resulting system and its implementation refer mainly to architectural and building design in the modes and forms in which it is carried out in advanced design offices. The model is actually used effectively also in other environments. The research simultaneously pursues an integrated model of the: • structure of the networked architectural design process (operators, activities, phases and resources); • required knowledge (distributed and functional to the operators and the process phases). While several aspects of the process structure were illustrated in the previous Symposium (Carrara and Fioravanti 2002), the present article deals essentially with the second point of the model: how the designers, “actors” in the broad sense (according to the ISO-STEP definition, Wix, 1997) in the design process share their own knowledge and how this can be exchanged among them (“Sip by sip knowledge” and the “esperanto interface” XML) in the various stages of its development. As far as the problems involved in the various knowledge bases of the several actors exchange are concerned, a short illustration of the proposed solution will be given at the end of the paper.