Activities Modelling by means of Process Ontologies

Quality, according to Pirsig’s universal statements, does not belong to the object itself, nor to the subject itself, but to both and to their interactions. In architecture, engineering and construction (A/E/C) it is terribly true as we have a Building Object and Users that interact with it. The problem we approach here, renouncing at the impossible task of modelling actor’s “libero arbitrio”, focuses on defining a set of occurrences, which dynamically happen both in the built environment and in the building site. If organized in a proper way, building process knowledge allows planners/designers/builders to represent usage scenario, predicting activity inconsistencies and evaluating the building performance in terms of workers safety and final users post occupancy experience. Studying the most common information standards in A/E/C sector, namely IFCs structure, we can observe that they have been developed by means of a space-components product approach, successful in terms of data exchange and information interoperability between programs, not intended for human understanding. This lack of semantics is reflected in the modelled buildings, once it is required to simulate its behavior in terms of usage, safety and comfort. With the aim of improving the quality of buildings, this paper explores a method for representing and linking process and product ontologies, enhancing their functional management. This research group, in the last years has formalized a general structure for building knowledge modelling (to share semantics, not only information) and is now working on early IT implementations to support logic synchronization between software for planning functional activities and software for authoring design of buildings and infrastructures. There is urgent need for tools able to link and translate business rules and program-project processes to check where business processes are not following building policies and rules. A benefit of the proposed knowledge representation is to provide automated assistance for process development by defining the semantics of process entities in a computer-manipulable way.