Open standards for building and geospatial information are rapidly changing.  So much is being figured out at the same time its hard to know which of the many parallel tracks will eventually meet in the distance.  For example:

Performance Specifications:  Proprietary versus generic names of things are very tricky ~ the CSI Construction Specification Institute International Framework Dictionary is currently being developed;   

Data Exchange Policies:  Recording brand names, model numbers, and manufacturer’s warranties as performance specifications, designs and data change hands from Architect, to Contractor, to Owner ~ COBIE Construction Operations Building Exchange is currently being developed;  

Building Codes:  Construction type and use group are able to align with building data by facility type and location ~ ICC International Code Council SmartCODES are currently being developed;  

Space Definition Rules:   BOMA calcs and owner program requirements ~ OSCRE Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate are currently being developed;  

Geospatial Coordination: OGC Open Geospatial Consortium has already made a huge impact, open standards continue to be developed with an impressive focus on interoperability amongst the standards themselves;  

Sustainability: Owners, Architects, and Contractors understand how to go for LEEDS points now ~ USGBC US Green Building Council has already made a huge impact, standards and requirements continue to be developed;  

Tools for Public Inquiry:  How can environmental organizations assess their area using USGBC/LEED data, GIS Watershed, BOMA Calcs, SMARTCodes and all the above while OmniClass, MasterFormat, UniFormat and all the words we use are constantly evolving?

BIMstorm and OPS provide an opportunity for non-technical people to like and understand the potential of BIM and open standards in simple ways.  Room Criteria Sheets and Google Earth are OK, regular people can play out a variety of scenarios without liabilities, deadlines, or costs.  It can’t be only technical people who solve these problems.   The main benefit of using the BIMstorm process and OPS is being able to figure out how open standards SHOULD work together with commercial technology.  Open standards need to be vendor neutral, but it takes vendors to help develop these standards along the way.  There is still a tremendous amount of work ahead and true interoperability will never be “done”.  Until then, using the BIMstorm process and OPS provides a unique opportunity to work together towards the same shared end goals.  Can’t get there without using real products and technology.

Deborah L. MacPherson AIA, CSI CCS
Specifications and Research, WDG Architecture PLLC
Projects Director, Accuracy&Aesthetics
NBIMS National Building Information Modeling Standard, Consensus and Model Implementation Guide Task Teams
Member of the buildingSMART alliance

A&AStructuredBackgroundCombination

Components starting with Michael K. Bergman on AI3 Adaptive Information, Adaptive Innovation, Adaptive Infrastructure. Not all components below are shown above.

Lack of Road Signs Causes Collisions and Missed Turns (459)

One Possible Road Map (515)

Full UMBEL Graph (no link)

From Wikipedia: An umbel is an inflorescence which consists of a number of short flower stalks (calledpedicels) which are equal in length and spread from a common point, somewhat like umbrella ribs. Umbels are a characteristic of plants such as carrot, parsley, dill, and fennel in the familyApiaceae, and ivy, aralia and fatsia in the family Araliaceae. A compressed cyme is called unbelliform if it resembles an umbel.

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More:

OpenCyc Selected Vocabulary and Upper Ontology

Linked Open Data

Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles at Daily Dose of Imagery

Crochet Model of Hyperbolic Plane by Daina Taimina, presented by the Institute for Figuring

Ontoforms by Accuracy&Aesthetics Director Ken Fields

Standard Upper Ontology Working Group (SUO WG)

terrain2 by Matthias M. Giwer at the Internet RayTracing Competition May-June 1999

There are too many facts and opinions to choose from and currently no way to stack conflicting and current points of view against each other in a simple format limited to a specific, narrow context, rather than the context of everything. In a medical situation, understanding all the options for medical reasons is unfortunately only part of the picture, there is also a need to become an instant expert in the swirl of confusion that is the insurance industry, not to mention the information pharmaceutical companies publish for public access. All three industries collide on a regular basis. Simple decisions may be influenced by a large number of conflicting viewpoints that may not care as much about the outcome as much as untrained users trying to learn new terminology to understand the pros and cons. Maybe FLIPP explainers could be used to understand the options, for example, IF hospice care is initiated THEN Medicare benefits will change.

FLIPPexplainer by David Cox

Having access to endless research, benefits, and reports does not make the decision easier or fix things in the real world. Diagrams can help see in overviews to consider what doctors are telling you, compared to what the industry position is, compared to what you can observe yourself to decide what is realistic, what to expect, how you can help. What is needed is something like a holding bin or personal visual dashboard to collect, analyze, and keep only the pieces that matter in your puzzle. For example, Figure 5 from Context Driven Topology drawings shows:

Instead of a curator, scientist, and detective - what if the points of view were brother, brother, and sister? From left to right, one approach is to integrate bits and pieces information into a solid position, another may choose to undertake a comprehensive survey, another may simply be trying to separate fact from fiction. A consensus across all three points of views and ways of making decisions may only intersect at one point. Too bad that point can’t be guided by all the medical, insurance, and pharmaceutical information.

How would such a point be derived? Maybe through Linked Open Data

Linked Data at DBpedia.org

“I see this as a topic map question with a good query mechanism that would allow you to match patterns and bubble to the top the requisite variety of solutions to the query.

There is something you see and talk about that I rarely do, the ability to fold, twist, and reveal. I have no clue how one goes about that except along the lines I suggested in an earlier post about manifolds, intersecting them, and playing them using something like a GBG (will ask: one of these or Glass Bead Network?) as an interface.

An old (late) friend Iben Browning used to talk about using evolutionary program and “spring” metaphors to let things like this self organize. The idea is that you arrange nodes in relationship to each other and add springs between them. You can watch this happen with touchgraph - the nodes jiggle around until the dust settles. You can tweak spring coefficients until something “makes sense” - - that’s what evolutionary programming does for you.”

See the big picture of clusters and interrelations within your data, and zoom in on whatever catches your interest, by TouchGraph.

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 FEEDBACK FROM NICHOLAS NISBET MA (Cantab) DipArch (UNL) Director AEC3 UK Ld.

 RE: “Set of data structures, or code templates, to extend semantic relationships that already exist in CSI and OCCS classifications to capture and describe building information by construction type, use group, code requirements and so on.”

I see (in the pdf below) that you are linking core concepts (Uniformat and MF2004 names) to various the classification systems and specification clauses (step 1 ,2) and related these to their usefulness for some building types (step 3-5 Looking at ICC allows  you to relate some requirements to ‘core concepts’ and/or ‘building types’. COBIE exposes the  classification of spaces, systems and registered types. Lastly your spreadsheet mentions standards that are relevant. Overall you have a tree of references and relationships.

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Developing a set of code and classification templates to track and standardize building information modeling exchanges. See pdf for explanation.

S30_13SpecificationSchemeExplanation

and the following links

bimSMART lab

COBIE

BuildingSMART Alliance

 Below are based on Choosing Colors where Amber at Onuma Planning System has recolored the models

buildings.

Building Code templates are a way of understanding the design of buildings and also what happens inside there. Some of this information is private, some is related to overall energy awareness and efficiency concerns, some are public services that could be shown on Google maps, some are simply where a person lives with preferred and ranked restaurants around them. Whatever the concerns, how do you get from all the possible information and building control system readings to the necessary and sufficient information needed for the general public to live their daily lives and participate in the governance of their local, regional, national and global community? Code templates are a stab at it. It is assumed every building type can use the same Division 01, General Conditions in their contract documents while being built. Its still unclear what happens after that in terms of the building lifecycle. Where building codes fit is still being figured out but probably in another band above Division01. The sample building models below have been provided by Onuma Planning System, the buildings will be evaluated with WDG Architecture, the purpose is to study Building Service Performance for a number of reasons. This post will be updated when more is known.

Looking at colors for the code/classification templates for the Building Service Performance project at Ontolog. Sample building models provided courtesy of Kimon Onuma at Onuma Planning System which is used for BIMstorm. Please see the Building Service Performance site for more information about the project. The basis of design above is adapted from this brochure at the Sasquatch Music Festival. Comments welcome on the colors above, other examples of color selection techniques are below.

_________ OTHER EXAMPLES OF COLOR SELECTION________

Color Brewer, Selecting Good Color Schemes for Maps by Cindy Brewer at Penn State University

Color Select Demo at the CodeProject

Satin Solids at My Faux Paws Apparel and Accessories

Alternate Color Selection at GeneCluster2 Reference Guide at the Broad Institute, MIT

Twisted Brush Pro Studio at Pixarra

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See Code Templates for More

Toronto’s City Hall, Nathan Phillips Square - reverse projections

Figure 3: Critical Path Identification in Step 2, by Agostino G. Bruzzone, Roberto Mosca, Roberto Revetria 
DIP – Dipartimento di Ingegneria della Produzione  

Work groups at NBIMS, the Building Service Performance Projectat Ontolog, Accuracy&Aesthetics and many, many related interdisciplinary efforts need diagrams to map out what they are working on and express their project goals.  An excellent guide to mapping software is available at mind-mapping.org.  Lots of people are making tools and there are a LOT of shared goals.  For example, the Compendium Institute, the Linking Open Data Project and related efforts at W3, the Open Knowledge Foundation is working on some interesting visualizations, initiatives to map science led by Katy Borner, view-theinfo at Google Groups, and networks like Twine are all doing amazing stuff.  Now how can we all work on, share, and gradually build the same diagrams and maps?

Some examples diagrams from simple to complex purposes are below.   One person, or a group of people, imagination is where it all starts, depending on how much information there is may need to dives down deep into uncharted complexity, then needs to come back up to communicate with everyone involved in such ambitious projects:

Real Change by Natalie Shell who … drew this up to amuse herself the other day while musing on real change at the same time as writing about organisational change processes for a clients and watching/dealing with the changes thrust upon people close to me

Yes there will be a test by Jessica Hagy …author writes her life and musings through venn diagrams on index cards

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Constructed topological skeleton by Max-Planck-Institut Informatik

Continuing with Tetrahedrization of critical points and connectors.

Finalizing with complete tetrahedrization

From the Progressive Licensing Framework for Discussion at Health Canada

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The default form envisioned for storage mode is a spiral.  Groups of ideas and information can be rearranged infinite ways while working with or distributing to and from precise locations. Locations can be physical, conceptual, or a combination of both.  Assuming constructing exchanges and working this way is possible, what shapes and topologies would be most effective?  What are their properties? What do they have in common? What would a computer and network language about these pathways, densities, colors, transparencies, forms, linkages and exchanges look like?

Its too complicated to wonder about ALL possible forms, the question can be simplified by just concentrating on spirals for an example. Therefore, a previous post Spiral Model is expanded to incorporate slides prepared by A&A Director Vera W. de Spinadel for a Postgraduate class on Form and Mathematics which focuses on logic and technique. Dr. de Spindel remarks “Of course this has a lot to do with the subject of Context Driven Topologies“. Lets see what this means to computers and networks, starting with :

Spiral Model, Boehm, 1988, Original Creator: Conrad Nutschan

According to Wikipedia on November 22, 2006: The spiral model is a software development process combining elements of both design and prototyping-in-stages, in an effort to combine advantages of top-down and bottom-up concepts. What a perfect shape spirals are to portray complex evolving relationships. Just imagine the possibilities using spirals as a base structure.

A Equiangular Spiral and its Secants from the Visual Dictionary of Special Plane Curves

Now for Vera’s slides:

English captions to be completed at a later date - this slide says “Carrying out some modifications in the process of construction of this spiral, we are going to build other linked with the Numbers of the FNMPP. In the following figure details of the construction are shown.”

Of course spirals are seen in nature and architecture. Rough translation “Finally, in the country of the Architectural Design, fits to mention the interesting antecedent of the Spiral building, built by the Arq. Fumihiko Maki in Tokyo, Japan in 1985. Maki gue prizewinner with the Prize Pritzker in 1993 and in its Spiral building has utilized the geometry of the curve, that conjugates marvelously the concepts of fragment and unattainable center. The geometric figure is an evocation of the ones that are found in Kyoto, in the famous Temple of Ginkakuji (Silver Building) 1338-1573 and in the Temple of Kinkakuji (Building of Gold) 1398, reconstructed in 1955. Though these denominations of Gold and Silver have religious and historic meaning, they would be able to serve of example to design making use of so much, metallic spirals flat curves like helicoides metallic.”

The question Vera is looking for is geometrical interpretations of the members of the family of metallic means - which she discovered in 1997. She found a relationship of the golden mean with the pentagon and another of the silver mean with the octagon. And that was all, there were no more relationships with polygons. So, she began trying to construct metallic spirals, generalizing the well known golden spiral - and was successful! She introduced a family of metallic spirals and continues intensively working with the silver spiral. There will be more to see when she presents at the International Conference on Geometry and Graphics ICGG-2008 in Dresden Germany.

Other computer and network systems that may be interesting to study in terms of forms, dynamic properties, geometry and graphics to streamline information that have been highlighted in recent discussions include:

Artificial Neural Networks

Pattern Recognition

Single Instance Storage

But what is even more interesting is

Homotopy

Collective Intelligence

and

the Information Economy Meta Language IEML see the paper “Collective Intelligence Protocol Semantic Metadata Exchange Standard (CIP-SMES)” by Michel Bietzunski and Steven Newcomb 18 July 2007. A commentary on this paper and Chapter 3 of Topic Maps by the same authors, edited by Jack Park is here IEMLcomments

3rd International Mathematics & Design Workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 3rd International Mathematics & Design Workshop will be held at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies, La Plata University on 6th and 7th June, 2008. Every interested person is invited to send an abstract before the 5th May, for evaluation through the Scientific Committee.

Las matematicas el diseno de aviones

For each communication there will be 20 minutes and it is a necessary requisite that their content has not been previously presented or published elsewhere. There will be a distinction between:
1) new results obtained on the subject of the results presented at M&D-2007 in Blumenau, Brazil;
2) completely new subjects.
There will be also Plenary Lectures of 30 minutes, delivered by personal invitation and these lectures could be in Spanish or English. The Proceedings will be published as a special issue of the Journal of M&D.

Please see the Nexus Journal and La Asociation Internacional de Matematica y Diseno

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from 2D Visualization of Electrical Fields of Point Charges around a Dielectric Interface at Vizlab

If lines of inquiry could be traced through semantic space for example in ShiftSpace, these lines would get very complicated. See BLDGBLOG too. Tracing lines of inquiry would be a whole new form of drawing and wondering what simple lines mean, more details and the work results would have to be explained in specifications separate from the drawings.

Below are a set of citations for images and papers collected around 2001, wondering about these shapes. Each example below has varying levels of documentation. This is an experiment to see what is still available. Most are not. Some are in new places than they were originally found but its still the same images and information.  Open source images have found many more uses. The remainder is a survey of scientific and artistic approaches to showing dynamics and tracing histories.

The Coffee Mill , by Juan Gris, 1916, Original: oil and collage on paper, 10 9/16” x 8 7/8”, Provenance: Henriette Reverdy, Paris; Pierre Chareau, Paris; E.V. Thaw & Co., New York; Herbert and Nannette Rothschild, Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York, from the book Encounters with Modern Art: The Reminiscences of Nannette F. Rothschild, George H. Marcus Editor and Anne D’Harnoncourt, Philadelphia Museum of Art; ISBN: 0876331088; 1997. Image is now available at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

DMacP Collage of Forms some below

Cross section of nautilus shell from the Patterns of Nature Disk Image KS1724 Comstock, Royalty Free

Hurricane: N-009-0110 Corbis Royalty Free at Matton Images

Galaxy: SC-086-0109 by Myron J. Dorf Bridges. Now available at Артикул

What Lies Between Order and Chaos? by James P. Crutchfield, The Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, New York (1994), Santa Fe Institute.

“The events happen far too quickly (over 10^-23 to, at the most lackadaisical, 10^-10, seconds) and in too small a region (on the order of 10^-18 meters) for human perception.”

“We’re maximally uncertain about the weather: we keep looking out the window for an update and are constantly surprised; the entropy rate is high.”

Theoretical Morphology: State of the Art, by Gunther J. Eble, Santa Fe Institute Working Papers

Sturgeon’s Law states that “ninety percent of everything is crap.” from One Thing or Another: Some Examples of Selection in Minds and Computers, A.K.A. “William James at CERN”, by Cosma Shalizi

Nude on a Red Background (Seated Woman), by Fernand Leger, 1927, Original: oil on canvas, 51 1/4” x 32”, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1972, 72.173, from the book Hirshhorn: Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jane McAllister Editor, Harry N. Abrams; ISBN: 0810934363; 1996.

Vitruvius, by Leonardo da Vinci, available everywhere, this copy from the British Library learning about bodies.

Asymmetrical rocks, Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, G81-161783 Cannot be found. Image above from jmg galleries.

“…semantic leaps in jokes, arguments, counterfactuals, and analogies”
Turning the Cat on its Head, by Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds, from the web site of Seana Coulson, University of California, San Diego, Department of Cognitive Science“…until at last we reach our perceptions, grouped together by another process of selection into things. Some of these we attend to; the rest we ignore.”

“…studies indicate that there is a certain level of visual and acoustic complexity that tends to be most pleasing to the human senses.” Holding a New Mirror to Nature, The Economist, 6 November1993

The Periodic Table of Poetry, now at MAKE

“…literature, pictures and sound and movies can all be turned into strings of bits. Once we have a measure of fitness, there is no a priori reason we could not turn standard techniques loose on an initial population of pictures, or sonatas, or sonnets. There are even techniques, outlined at least by Holland, which will allow our system to modify the means it uses to evaluate fitness. In particular, rather than mutating and recombining essentially random lengths of bits, they system could come to recognize that certain blocks of bits are meaningfully connected. It also does not seem impossible, or even terribly difficult, to modify the standard techniques of genetic programming so as to work directly on two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects.” Genetic Algorithms for Art by Cosma Shalizi

Mathematical Equations on Chalkboard, by Steve Cole AA011042  at Getty Images now at Diomedia

“Fun” by Condensed Matter Research with Neutrons and Muons (NuM) at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI)

But architects also ask, what is this space represented by lines and specifications really made of?

The Light Inside, by James Turrell, 1999, Original: electric lights, wires, metal and paint, Museum of Fine Arts Houston Texas, from Modern Painters Magazine, Winter 2001

Seminar Hall in the Museum for African Art , by Maya Lin, New York City, 1992-93, Associated Architect, David Hotson, from Boundaries, Simon and Schuster; ISBN: 0684834170; 2000.

Stainless Steel Mesh, Design 9, Lumsden Custom Mesh, 1-800-367-3664
Classic Travertine, Vein Cut, Unfilled and Honed, Stone Source, 202-265-5900
Clear Satin on Cherry, 20A, David Edwards Furniture Company, 410-242-2222
Wrought Iron, Benjamin Moore, 2124-10
Clear Natural Riverstone, Artistic Tile, NY 212-727-9331
Glass, AR 105, by Skyline Design, 773-278-4660
Gel, BTG 150 Starke 9mmm kein Farbmuster Peer Almute, Smooth, 800-433-7337
Platinum, by Ben Park

See the actual buildings of
The National Gallery of Modern Art, India
National Museum of Modern Art, Japan, 3rd floor Special Corner
National Gallery of Australia

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