Casebook. an Information Retrieval System for Housing Floor Plans

Floor plans are representations of choice for spatial information in architectural practice. They are expressive, readable, and familiar. My research examines possible uses of floor plan layouts in architectural information systems. Classification problems that arise are addressed by lazy computation. A prototype in the domain of residential units, CaseBook, has been developed and implemented. CaseBook uses graphical floor plans as core representations for storage, classification and retrieval. To reflect the plasticity of interpretations inherent to the complex and ill-defined architectural domain, the focus is on the flexibility of classification schemes. Flexibility is achieved through the application of adaptable automatic feature extraction and classification-on-demand by user-selected criteria. Queries can be graphically expressed in example layouts. The system ranks layouts according to their similarity to a query based on weighted nearest neighbor algorithm