The complexity of urban systems is an increasingly common topic in academic literature. Following in the footsteps of the industrial sector, which has understood this issue for many years now, urban engineering must also tackle the challenges created by complex systems. Industrial engineering has provided a number of responses to this challenge, including design technologies, which are notably collaborative. It seems possible, at least in theory, to transfer a number of best practice methods and adapt these to the conceptualisation of urban development projects (in the initial phase) in order to encourage their global management (in terms of strategic decision-making) and their social acceptability. The challenge is then to formulate new methodological models, as well as to create an environment dedicated to their application.

A cooperative design is a social activity inside a group. In this kind of activity, each actor plays a specific role. If each actor wants to realize the actions corresponding to his role, he needs some adaptive information about the cooperation context.The cooperation context of design project is a relational organization where each actor maintains specific relations with other people (designers, project managers, etc.) but also with documents and activities. Such a cooperation context exists in architectural cooperative design which is distinguished by a "mutual prescription" between actors. In architectural design we are in a network model of actors, instead of the hierarchical model that we can find in classical workflow tools.This organization has to be represented in the project management tool to give each user an adaptive vision of the project organization and evolution.The representation and the visualization of such a network, which characterizes each project, is the main objective of the "Relational Model of Cooperation" and the hypermedia view presented in this paper.

enable the designer to quickly explore a great number of spatial solutions. INTRODUCTIONSince the early 80's CAD tools have provided us with a new means of graphic representation in architecture. Contrary to the usual manner in which spatial forms are represented in a 2D "glance" [in sections, elevations and 3D model "constructed" by the computer. Admitting that graphic figuration plays a key role in architecture (Lebahar, 1983) (Boudon et al., 1994) these recent developments constitute an important milestone in the practice of conceptualisation. In fact today's computer techniques provide architecture with a unique opportunity for "retooling" and "re-thinking" its methodologies just as happened with the arrival of perspectives and stereometric projections. 3D model software [Catia, Maya, etc.] In this paper, we make the assumption that a shape modelling process can rely on the application of a set of morphological operators to initial shapes. We refer to several researches which have attempted to identify such operators. We also attempt to validate this design approach through the analysis of some buildings. A design system based on the combination of these operators could

Abstract:Architectural design is a domain where using pictures (e.g., drawing, photographs, …) is essential because the nature of the information transmitted by photographic image is often easier to interpret. The fact is that an image requires less interpretation than a text. The information transmitted by image (element shape, colour, light, ...) is already "put in shape" and so can be more easily integrated into the design process. This paper presents a way to index more efficiently an image database of the wooden architecture domain. Images in our databases illustrate real architectural elements. This work aims to analyse the representation of the real element illustrated by images. The analysis will allow us to identify some criteria related to the visual features of each image. The identified criteria will be used in a discriminating way to associate a weight with an indexation term describing its representation illustrated by an image. The importance of that representation (according to what is seen at first) is evaluated depending on graphic rules which correspond to the graphic properties of the representation of the element in each image.

The HYPERCAT (HYPERmedia electronic CATalog) project proposes a digital organization of the technical information relative to the building products and materials. Its application on technical information search by images is one of context-based image search engines. However, a manual construction of an image database for this application can be very costly. The image extracted from the French building product providers' Web sites can solve the problem of acquisition and indexing. The problematics of Web image extraction for this activity are how can we extract and index the pertinent images. Consequently, this question leads to twofold challenges: image extraction and image indexing. First, the extraction rules are applied to illustrate the image extraction process. Second, the image indexing process uses the image context and a thesaurus.