Assisting Architectural Designers with a Collaborative Semantic Web

International audienceThis paper presents a research on the collective activity of architectural design that has led to develop a new semantic web tool for enhancing it. This research has been commissioned by a specific architectural design team to better understand their own work patterns in order to improve them. Consequently, the work has consisted in analyzing the collective architectural design of the team on one hand and to search the better means to aid it on the other hand. So, in a first phase, we have realized an architecturological analysis of the collective work implemented in architectural design and in a second phase, we have developed a prototype of an original new semantic collaborative web tool to assist the agency to better work together. From the first phase, three kinds of result have been built: results about the representations built and uses to collaborate in architectural conception, results about the means of the collective work of architectural conception and results about the needs of computer tools for collaborative design. The second phase of the research has led to build a prototype of a new semantic web tool adapted to the collective work of the agency, based on Web 2.0 technologies, and enhanced with semantic web techniques