Supporting the building design process with graph-based methods using centrally coordinated federated databases (original) (raw)

Background Technological developments and globalized working processes have transformed the building process. However, current digital semantic building models no longer adequately represent the increasing complexity of modern building projects. The potential of combining agent-based and graph-based methods, for example for energy calculations or spatial research strategies, is not fully exploited. Methods In our system, users search for building floorplans, for example as sources of inspiration, by creating conceptual hand-drawn sketches of building parts on multi-touch devices. The sketch is analyzed and used to query a federated database system comprising a building information model server, the graph database neo4j and the content management system mediaTUM. Users interact with client applications that show and continuously update a list of floorplans by sending queries to a central coordinator service. In the paper, we describe the coordinator that enables our databases to appe...