Multi-functional façade components allow extending façade functionalities from the building’s physical appearance towards multiple other fields (e.g. HVAC, electric system). Integrating those complex products into the building design and planning phases, however, is not yet supported well enough to make their application feasible. To facilitate manufacturers in providing necessary product description and planners in accessing product data, their ways of communication need to be enhanced. Therefore, it must be possible to describe innovative components containing views from diverse roles of the building processes in a level of detail that allows the product description’s utilisation during the entire building and product lifecycle. Furthermore, products defined by this description need to be distributed in product catalogues, enabling targeted product search among products from various manufacturers. The technical integration of multi-functional components’ digital description would empower all concerned planners to get a holistic view for their role. Since the description covers a broad range of not always needed information, planners need assistance in interpreting it. This includes the reduction of the extensive product resp. project description to a dataset containing only relevant information for a specific use case and the transformation of the reduced dataset into a data format that can be interpreted by the use cases’ software application.
This paper proposes a data description schema based on Semantic Web Technologies (SWT), a distributed product catalogue, and pre-processing methods for filtering and data conversion. As these fields of research have been well observed, we do not propose new standards competing with existing ones, but methods for applying and combining existing standards and to endorse the integration of multi-functional components into the building processes. The product description serves as data basis for the proposed product catalogue and focuses on an abstract and thereby generic description level to describe the product’s physical and semantical structure and properties. Based on SWT, the distributed product catalogue was designed linking towards multiple product databases, that can be hosted by manufacturers themselves, and provides a central querying point for product searches. Additionally, we propose methods for filtering datasets using already existing filters and combining them in filter packages. The resulting information can then be processed by flexible wrappers based on SWT. Concluding, we introduce fields of applications for the proposed methods in this paper, and discuss the methodology with respect to its benefits, re-usability and alignment to the wish to apply or modify existing resources instead of creating new standards.
The developed methodologies facilitate planners in evaluating complex components without having expert knowledge in every field addressed by multi-functional elements. This in turn lowers the needed effort for applying innovative products and thereby helps the construction sector to achieve progress in utilising up-to-date technologies.
