Use of requirement traceability in collaborative design environments

Object sharing in computer supported collaborative design requires multiple participants not only to be able to modify design objects when participating in a collaborative design scenario, but also be able to query them for specific information. Especially in the design of complex artefacts, such as buildings, as the relationships that need to be tracked and dependencies between the participants and created objects increase, so do the difficulties of converging on a single design. Often the shared objects are represented with their most salient design attributes, such as geometric information, to assist computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). Capturing non-geometric information in CSCW requires a shift in the way design objects are represented and queried. In this paper, we present our work in computer aided requirement traceability for architectural design, which addresses an alternative way to parse design objects to assist object sharing in collaborative design.