THE ARROW FRAMEWORK FOR A BUILDING OBJECT WAREHOUSE

This paper describes the DOE 1 supported ARROW (Advanced Reusable and Robust Objects Warehouse) project, the services it will provide, the research issues it is addressing and how it fits into the whole UK construction Industry Knowledge Base (IKB) system. The ARROW project will require the development of new techniques for selection and retrieval of data across distributed databases. The project is examining how to establish an interface to distributed databases containing product information, allowing fast and accurate retrieval of specified products, as well as delivering information in a form useable by CAD systems and other design tools (e.g., thermal simulation programs). Initial work is looking at appropriate product selection and techniques for the refinement of options to narrow and improve the selection process. Agent technologies are being investigated for retrieval processes, alongside standard methods for retrieval of information. Though developing standards (e.g., ISO-STEP, IAI) can be used for the representation of much information about products, the majority of manufacturers do not maintain their information in such a form, and do not have tools to manipulate their data in this form. This paper investigates what toolkits will have to be developed for manufacturers to be able to migrate their product data into the form that would be required to operate within the ARROW system. Prototypes of these toolkits will be developed in association with several large manufacturers who will be providing the initial population of product data for the project. This project is in line with the Construct-IT implementation strategy (DOE96a).