Serving building product information with design knowledge servers

Building product information is a valuable resource for building design, but the number of different producers and products makes it hard for a single person to keep informed of all available products. A solution to this problem would be computer-based product information repositories, from which designers could fetch up-to-date information. The Design Knowledge Server (DesKs) approach has properties that make it function as such a product information repository. Compared to other approaches, it provides enhanced functionality that will benefit especially architects in early design phases. The paper introduces the main characteristics of DesKs and describes the way design information is modelled in this approach. It focuses on how a technology called Feature Type Recognition (FTR), which is part of this development, can be used to find product information