Divas Multimedia Information Retrieval From Multimodal Design And Construction Knowledge Corpora
Renate Fruchter and Zhen Yin · Proceedings of the Joint CIB W78, W102, ICCCBE, ICCC, and DMUCE International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering, Montreal, Canada, 14-16 June · 2006
Managing and reusing knowledge can lead to greater competitive advantage, and improved designs. However, design knowledge reuse often fails in the AEC (Architect, Engineering, and Construction) industry. We performed an ethnographic study to investigate the current practice of the shop drawing detailing and review process. Our observations show that most of the design and detailing knowledge among three key stakeholders: structural engineers, detailers, and architects, is communicated through discourse, sketch, and gesture. This multimodal design knowledge is not reusable because of two reasons: (1) the design knowledge is evolving through these informal and multimodal communication channels, which is hard to capture. (2) Even if the multimedia recording devices and technologies are used to capture these communications, the archived multimedia data is highly unstructured, and consequently to search and retrieve relevant content. This study focuses on two research questions: (1) how to capture the stakeholders' knowledge and experience with high fidelity and least overhead? (2) how can stakeholders search, retrieve, and understand relevant knowledge from a large, unstructured, rich, and multimodal knowledge repository? We present DiVAS (Digital Video Audio Sketch) a multimedia information capture and retrieval system to addresses these knowledge reuse issues. DiVAS is able to capture the multimodal design knowledge, improve the communications among stakeholders through effective contextual cross-media content retrieval, and significantly reduce the number of RFIs (Request for Information).