Design Collaboration Mediated Across Different Decentralised Semantics

The objective of collaboration in the design process is to combine the distinct knowledge held by the participants into an integrated, consistent and sig-nificant intellectual product. The aggregation of individual participants’ data alone does not provide sufficient understanding, analysis, discussion, acceptance, or inte-gration of the ideas brought in by other participants into their respective sections of the project. Several researchers believed that centralised data structures were the solution to the problem of common understanding. They thought that using unified data structures would make it easier to translate one form of representation into another and reduce the potential for errors caused by these translations. BIM process relies on the interchange of documents, frequently utilising proprietary formats filtered and transmitted via Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). Instead of promoting collaboration, this centralised form of representation confirmed that the AEC/O (Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations) ecosystem is highly fragmented, making the data-centric approach frequently impractical due to technical and procedural limitations. The IFC shared database, not only in large scale projects, rapidly becomes excessively voluminous and difficult to manage, hindering the dynamic process of multi-disciplinary collaborative design. This research work introduces an innovative approach based on a distributed model that incorporates semantics into participants’ ontology representations, to promote a more efficient flow of knowledge. The paper refers to current developments and future trends of standards for federated multi-models (e.g. using the potentials of the Semantic Web and Linked Data) to address design challenges. In addition, we propose an early framework for the process of authoring and publishing seman-tics through an intelligent filter mechanism, which facilitates a greater level of common understanding among the participants.