Interleaving Semantics: a Filter Mediated Communication Model to Support Collaboration in Multi-Disciplinary Design

The purpose of collaboration is to integrate the separate knowledge possessed by the participants in the design process into one meaningful whole. Centralized data structures, showed that the AEC industry is so fragmented that the data-centric approach is not feasible, for technical and procedural reasons. The shared database, minimizing the complexity of translating different form of representation, quickly becomes too large and unwieldy to support the dynamic process of multi-disciplinary collaborative design. In this paper, we propose a distributed model that includes a mechanism to facilitate the participants’ intentions more effectively by incorporating semantics into their representations. We also present how the semantics would be authored and published through the mechanism so that a higher level of shared understanding among the participants would be achieved.