Image indexing vocabulary in architecture<br />Taxonomic hierarchy and categorisation

Architectural design is a domain where the use of pictures (drawing,photography,...) is essential, because the information transmitted by photographicimages are often more easily to understand than the one transmitted by texts. Thispaper presents a common vocabulary and its structure relations used forprofessional people belonging to the wood construction domain researchinginformation for their project through images. The images allow us to transmitnecessary and lacked information, to the designer, by illustrating " reference objects" in their absence. To help the designer, we propose an image database illustratingexisting architectural constructions. The problem we are faced with is the filing andthe classification of those images from a semantic point of view. This classificationcannot be done without identifying the information transmitted by images and theirtranscription in a structured vocabulary. The structured vocabulary includes thename of the illustrated architectural objects to facilitate access to the informationduring research. The question is " how to describe at the same time visual andrecognisable architectural elements in words?"