Stefano Cursi

A Semantic Web Approach for Built Heritage Representation

In a built heritage process, meant as a structured system of activities aimed at the investigation, preservation, and management of architectural heritage, any task accomplished by the several actors involved in it is deeply influenced by the way the knowledge is represented and shared. In the current heritage practice, knowledge representation and management have shown several limitations due to the difficulty of dealing with large amount of extremely heterogeneous data. On this basis, this research aims at extending semantic web approaches and technologies to architectural heritage knowledge management in order to provide an integrated and multidisciplinary representation of the artifact and of the knowledge necessary to support any decision or any intervention and management activity. To this purpose, an ontology-based system, representing the knowledge related to the artifact and its contexts, has been developed through the formalization of domain-specific entities and relationships between them.

Operational Scenarios Simulation to Support Building Design: A Hospital Design Case Study

In hospitals the configuration of the environment deeply affects the efficiency of the host organization, supporting or preventing the activities of intended users and operators. Although some simulation models have recently been introduced in architectural design, their actual application is limited to simulate people’s movement in case of specific events (i.e. fire egress or crow dynamics in public stations). More effective models, able to simulate more complete building use scenarios are still missing. To overcome this lack, the research described in this paper aims at developing a model to virtually simulate use scenarios in hospital buildings, in order to provide use-related feedback to architects during the design process. The proposed model integrates two main components: 1) a formalization level, where the use scenario is represented through Business Process Modeling approach in terms of activities performed, actors involved and hosting spaces; 2) a simulation environment where the determined scenario is actually computed and executed. The resulting phenomena is visualized in a 3D virtual environment, allowing architects to observe how the building will respond to the scripted scenario in order to detect critical points and solve design errors and inconsistencies.

A Platform for Enriching BIM Representation Through Semantic Web Technologies

This paper investigates the possibilities related to BIM representation enrichment through semantic web approaches, and presents a prototypal application oriented to the integration of the informative model of the building with a knowledge base developed by means of ontologies. Its scope is to enhance the semantic level of representation of building information models, as well as enlarging the representation spectrum including knowledge not directly representable in the BIM schema.