Developing a Spatial Context-Aware Building Model and System to Construct a Virtual Place

The current notion of space seems to be inappropriate to deal with contemporary and future CAAD applications because it lacks of user and social values. Instead of using a general term called'space', our approach is to consider the common unit in architectural design process as a place composed of space, user and activity information. Our research focuses on developing a novel intelligent building data model carrying the essence of place. Through our research, the needs of using virtual architectural models among various architectural applications are investigated at first step. Second, key characteristics of spatial information are summarized and systematically classified. The third step is to construct a semantically-rich building data model based on structured floor plan and the semantic location modelling. Then intermediate functions are created providing an interface between the model and future applications. Finally, a prototype system, PlaceMaker, is developed to demonstrate how to apply our building data model to construct virtual architectural models embodying the essences of place