Computing Ontologies to Support AEC Collaborative Design: Towards a Building Organism delicate concept

To help architects in real life work it is needed to clarify what a building is from their point of view. Till now we have seen that building design aid programs are mainly conceived from an “external” perspective, that of computer scientists. Difficulties related to architectural design support programs result from: an insufficient overall model of the building; an inadequate formalization of information; an underestimated complexity inherent in the design process. To overcome these difficulties we introduce a 'systemic' building model that takes into account discipline-specific goals by means of relation structures to relate entities of domains and ontologies to formalize knowledge.