Modeling building project information

Building projects are expressed in a variety of documents presenting different abstractions of the building. Web-based project management systems are gaining ground as environments for organizing and managing these documents. However, such systems lack the possibility to distinguish and relate different components within these documents. By adopting a uniform language, e.g., XML, as a common syntax to represent these abstractions, documents can be interpreted and broken up into components in order to achieve a richer information structure. These components within and between abstractions can be related, and these relationships added to the representation. The result is an integrated structure of components and relationships, represented in a uniform way, offering new views not inherent in the structure as created by the original abstractions. This paper focuses on some of the representational issues involved in the process of interpreting, breaking up, and relating abstractions.