Cherneff, J M (1990) Knowledge-based interpretation of architectural drawings. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.
Abstract
Architectural schematic drawings have been used to communicate building designs for centuries. The symbolic language used in these drawings efficiently represents much of the intricacy of the building process (e. g. implied business relationships, common building practice, and properties of construction materials). The drawing language is an accepted standard representation for building design, something that modern data languages have failed to achieve. In fact, the lack of an accepted standard electronic representation has hampered efforts at computer intergration and perhaps worsened industry fragmentation. In general, drawings must be interpreted, by a professional, and then reentered in order to transfer them from one CAD system to another. This work develops a method for machine interpretation of architectural (or other) schematic drawings. The central problem is to build an efficient drawing parser (i. e. a program that identifies the semantic entitites, characteristics, and relationships that are represented in the drawing). The parser is built from specifications of the drawing grammar and an underlying spatial model. The grammar describes what to look for, and the spatial model enables the parser to find it quickly. Coupled with existing optical recognition technology, this technique enables the use of drawings directly as: (1) a database to drive various AEC applications, (2) a communication protocol to integrate CAD systems, (3) a traditional user interface.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Logcher, R D |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | CAD systems; building design; building process; communication; fragmentation; professional |
| Index terms: | fragmentation, database, building process, program, construction material, building practice, specification, business relationship, user interface, drawing, building design |
| Subjects: | technical documentation, data management, building construction, strategic management, business, software systems, contractual condition, building materials, human-computer interaction, architectural design |
| Topics: | Organizational Design, Business Strategy, Contract Administration, Digital Applications, Site Management, Construction Technology, Engineering Principles, Design Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here