Digital diary of a building: a system for retrieval and update of information over a building life cycle

We consider a digital diary of a building to be a system for flexibly retrieving and updating building information over the life cycle of the building —a system that is independent of any task-centric use. The key challenges to realizing such a system are the users and their intensions. For a practical demonstration of the notion we use IFC as the protocol for representing a building information model space and the concept of sorts to embrace representational flexibility. The ideas for the digital diary stem from four real construction case studies which we undertook as part of an ongoing