Robert Amor's Publications in 2002

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Amor, R., Burry, J., Fischer, T., Burry, M. and Woodbury, R. (2002) Ontology Specification for Design Communication, Proceedings of the ANZAScA Architectural Education: from Pedagogy to Androgogy, Geelong, Australia, 1-4 November, pp. 27-34.

Abstract: As a first manifestation of a recently launched international research project, this position paper outlines an approach to use ontologies as a means to tame the high degree of complexity involved in most collaborative (architectural) design projects which derives from the involvement of their numerous participants. Traditionally, these various involvements have tended to be structured hierarchically and/or temporarily according to general flow diagrams outlining collaborative structures towards project completion. The advent of (potentially synchronous) digital communication worldwide has broadened the scope for creative collaboration and added to the, often less than subtle, language challenges across discipline boundaries a possible added ingredient of great physical distance. This paper explores the need for, opportunities and potential challenges in research to develop and test generic ontology-based support systems for design. On the following pages we will lay down the foundation for this extensive project by defining the term ontology, setting out our theoretical position towards this subject matter, briefly covering examples of alternative online (design) collaboration support tools and describing what we currently believe might be a possible solution to common design communication problems and the nature of what could be an appropriate product to support it.

Amor, R., Betts, M., Coetzee, G. and Sexton, M. (2002) Information Technology for Construction: Recent Work and Future Directions, ITcon, http://www.itcon.org/2002/16/, ISSN 1400-6529, Vol 7, pp. 245-258.

Abstract: Advancing the application of information technology in construction is a major international research and innovation endeavour of concern to scientific establishments and industry. A significant focal point for this research, in terms of its dissemination and the derivation of a shared research agenda, has been the working commission concerned with IT for construction within the International Council for Innovation and Research in Construction (CIB). Working commission 78 of CIB has been active for about 20 years in holding annual meetings of leading scholars in the field. These annual meetings have allowed the principal research activities from around the world to be presented to expert fora and documented in a series of annual proceedings. More recently, some of the more complete research projects have been reported in an on-line electronic journal published in association with the working commission. The meetings have typically allowed debates and discussion to take place regarding the state of progress with key research themes, the emergence of new research themes, and a vision of construction activities in the future to which ongoing research could relate. This paper seeks to capture some of the overall experiences from the activities of this working commission by reviewing the key research issues that have been addressed in recently reported work and seeking to elicit a vision of future IT-enabled construction projects that might inform future research. It reports on an overview of the scope, current approaches and future research agenda that has arisen from consideration of the papers presented, and discussion that took place, at its most recent meetings in South Africa in 2001 and Denmark in 2002.

Amor, R.W. and Ge, C.W. (2002) Mapping IFC Versions, Proceedings of the EC-PPM Conference on eWork and eBusiness in AEC, Portoroz, Slovenia, 9-11 September, pp. 373-377.

Abstract: In order to cope with the growing number of versions of IFC schema being utilized by design tools in architecture, engineering and construction domains it is necessary to generate mappings between the different versions. This paper describes a system which can interrogate two schema versions in the same domain and automatically generate a mapping specification between them. The system supports refinement by a domain expert, to complete mappings which could not be automatically determined, or to correct those which were misidentified by the system. The categorization of mappings which are identified by the system are described in the paper along with statistics for the system's use on major IFC versions.

Chen, Y. and Amor, R. (2002) Identification and Classification of A/E/C Web Sites and Pages, Proceedings of the CIB W78 Conference on Distributing Knowledge in Building, Aarhus, Denmark, 12-14 June, Vol 2, pp. 37-44.

Abstract: Current search engines are not well suited to serving the needs of A/E/C professionals. The general ones do not know about the vocabulary of the domain (e.g., so ’window’ is a meaningless word) or rely on human classification (which severely limits the percentage of sites which are indexed). Domain specific databases and hot lists tend to be the only other option. While these have very good information they reflect a very small proportion of what is on the web. This paper looks at a system for automated classification of web sites and pages in the A/E/C domain. In particular, we concentrate on web sites and pages in New Zealand, and use the common classification system for the New Zealand construction industry (CBI). For this particular problem it is clear that no single approach to classifying web information gives a perfect answer. We therefore combine several approaches for automated classification, including:

• Identifying web sites that are already classified by other Internet portals and mapping these classifications to the CBI classification system.
• Extracting keywords from web pages and sites and then finding the relationships between the extracted keywords and topics in the CBI classification system.
• Using link analysis to find related web pages on a certain topic in the CBI classification system.

When an A/E/C professional searches with our system we determine metrics for each approach above, and find the best combination of approaches to determine a classification and hence the resultant web sites and pages.
This paper describes the components of the search engine which has been created and provides an analysis of the classification approaches.

Lu, S., Amor, R. and Donn, M. (2002) An Internet-based Building Simulation Quality Assurance System, Proceedings of the CIB W78 Conference on Distributing Knowledge in Building, Aarhus, Denmark, 12-14 June, Vol 2, pp. 225-232.

Abstract: Building environmental design decision support tools in architecture are not well used, even though there exists a wide range of tools for thermal, lighting, structural, etc simulation. Previous work has looked at the issues which inhibit the use of these decision support tools (Donn et al. 2001) and determined that a simulation quality assurance system would help practitioners to trust the predictions of a simulation system. This paper describes the development of a distributed building simulation quality control system.
The basic premise behind this work is that we can determine the reliability of the results of an individual simulation through comparison with previous quality assured simulations. This requires a test to determine whether an e-building is real, where real is some measure relating the behaviour of the e-building to know real building behaviour. To make this test we collate a case base of quality assured e-buildings with which we can compare the submitted e-building. The development of the case base is drawn from the Internet by developing the semantic web concept. This requires simulationists to provide meta-data describing their simulations which is then harvested across the WWW, along with the simulations, to form a global and distributed simulation case base.
This paper describes the Internet-based system which has been developed to collate the case base from interested simulationists (comprising XML-based meta-data and simulation files) and utilise it in comparing with a submitted e-building. The comparison system utilises XML-based information management approaches tied to case-based reasoning to create this high-performance decision support system for architects.

Li, Y., Grundy, J., Amor, R. and Hosking, J. (2002) A data mapping specification environment using a concrete business form-based metaphor, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments, Arlington, USA, 3-6 September, pp. 158-167.

Abstract: Many systems require data transformation – the conversion of complex data from one format to another. Most current approaches require programming, scripting or use abstract visual specifications and are targeted to programmers, not business analysts or other end users. We describe a data transformation specification tool that uses a concrete visual metaphor based on the concept of copying data from one business form to another. We describe the visualisation of complex business data in a form that matches the cognitive needs of non-programmer business analysts and the specification of data transformations using our form copying metaphor. A prototype environment is described along with a cognitive dimensions evaluation of our end user visual language.

Cope, G. and Amor, R.W. (2002) UDDI for a Manufactured Product Brokering Service, Proceedings of the EC-PPM Conference on eWork and eBusiness in AEC, Portoroz, Slovenia, 9-11 September, pp. 603-608.

Abstract: The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) initiative provides for distributed web-based information registries of web services. UDDI registries can be used to promote and discover distributed web services. This provides an alternate model to that offered by catalog vendors to date where each manufacturer has to provide separate information to each catalog within which they wish to list their products. This project describes an implementation of UDDI registries to test their ability to handle product manufacturers and suppliers in a brokering framework. It provides a uniform interface for manufacturers and suppliers to define their business offerings and their ability to provide further information to interested parties. The system also provides a product search interface for users to identify products matching a particular classification and discusses how this could be extended to include product parameters.