Increasing information feed in the process of structural steel design

Abstract

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associationsand references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With theincreasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information systemthat provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during thedesign process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how theincreased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We investigate to what extentinformation can be described with these technologies in the context of structural steel design. Thisinvestigation indicates possibilities regarding information reuse in the process of structural steel design and,by extent, in other design contexts as well.