Engineering Portals
Networked Collaborative Architectural Information
Management
SZEWCZYK, Jaroslaw
Bialystok University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture [email protected]
Engineering projects contain high volume of complex, structural data. The data is used in
many contexts; and it is also related to communication processes. An analysis of data
management tools is essential for dealing with large engineering project.
The paper deals with classifications of data management services as well as communication
ones offered by collaborative engineering portals. Existing taxonomies of communication
tools, and data management tools, are presented. Author’s working typology is discussed.
Keywords: Portals; EDM; EIM; extranets, groupware, CSCW
Introduction
Architectural projects became large object databases integrated with modeling engine. Design work applied data management techniques, and CAD software evolved towards combine, multidisciplinary environments, interacting with a variety of information structures. In effect CAD became a tool for acting with a very large amount of complex design information. Collaborative design enlarged the problem of acting with architectural data: the more people were involved in design work, the more information structures they dealt with.
There were many attempts to solve this problem, such as:
- A few procedures were added to CAD software, in order to help with CAD-level acting with data (such as “project-trees”, “managers” etc.). - Software for data management (EDM - Enterprise
Document Management, TDM - Technical Data Management, PDM - Product Data Management and other xDMs) has been created and integrated with CAD environments (the example can be Primavera Systems’ Primavera Project Planner or Bentley’s ProjectWise).
- Networked design environments were developed with a large number of task-specific solutions, organizing data and design activities.
- More than 200 engineering portals have been created around the world since 1997, and they have started to offer a wide variety of data management services.
Engineering portals with their services extend CAD platforms with multi-level data management techniques, enabling a designer to share project data across space boundaries or time limits, and, on the other hand, helping him with overcoming of data flood. Data management in engineering portals grades according to a variety of factors, such as data granularity, data types, users’ access to data, relationships between users etc. Communication processes in portals influence data management according to time and space limits, mediation type and many other factors. That is why classification of engineering data management and communication techniques, factors, and tools, is needed in order to get taxonomies useful for collaborative CAD software development.
Examples of existing classifications
There are some working classifications, which refer more or less strictly to engineering data management problem, especially to its collaborative aspects. They all can help with understanding factors, which influence collaborative data management.
Taxonomies of Group Computing Applications based on time/place factors
DeSanctis and Gallupe (1987) created 3x3 typology of group decision support systems (Fig. 1), and then proposed a taxonomy based on group members’ proximity (face-to-face, dispersed), group size (smaller, larger), and task type (planning, creativity, intellective, preference, cognitive conflict, mixed motive).
Nickerson (1997) similarly classifies groupware applications (not software or services) according to three factors: time/place of mediation between participants and channels of interaction (media type). Participants in a collaboration process may be in the same or different places and at the same or different times, exchanging audio only, video only, data only or using any combination of these media types. These factors enable to put any application into one of 28 groups, for example Video Conferencing application can be defined as follows: Same Time/Same Place/ Audio and Video.
There are some authors that extend Nickerson’s taxonomy, defining time/place/mediation factors more detailed, and other apply the taxonomy to wider or narrower range of applications; for example Kao and Lin (1998) adopt the taxonomy to classify only CAD/ CAM collaborative tools.
Some authors exclude mediation level, focusing on time/place factors only. For instance Bergman and Baker (2000), put the time/place paradigm as a foundation for their definition of two main environments supporting collaborative work. The first environment is the shared virtual workspace. In this environment the design data and documentation is available to all anytime and anywhere. The second is the virtual
meeting environment, with video-conferencing and data-conferencing capabilities. In future the shared virtual workspace and virtual meeting environments are expected to merge into a virtual reality meeting environment that will allow any people, located anywhere, to use all its tools at any time.
Most variants of such classifications are easy to remember and have great ‘educational’ value, but real work activities don’t fall into these categories very well, and narrow tasks’ applications don’t seem to be useful. That is why many authors focus on tools’ classifications rather than on applications’ topologies, and they use other, more complex factors in their classifications.
Taxonomies of Group Computing Software
Malone and Crowston (1994) propose the taxonomy of cooperative work tools based on the management/ coordination processes they support (http:// ccs.mit.edu/papers/ CCSWP157.html: May 2001). The processes are: (1) Managing shared resources (task assignment and prioritization); (2) Managing producer/consumer relationships; (3) Managing simultaneity constraints (synchronizing); (4) Managing task/subtask relationship; (5) Group decision-making; and (6) Communication.
Figure 1. A 3x3 taxonomy of group decision support systems (DeSanctis and Gallupe, 1987)
Coleman (1997; www.collaborate.com/ p u b l i c a t i o n / p u b l i c a t i o n s _ r e s o u r c e s _ groupware_book_chap_1.htm: May 2001) classifies groupware into twelve categories. These are: (1) Electronic Mail and Messaging; (2) Group Calendaring and Scheduling; (3) Electronic Meeting Systems; (4) Desktop and Real-Time Data Conferencing; (5) Non-Real Time Conferencing; (6) Group Document Handling; (7) Workflow; (8) Workgroup Utilities and Groupware Development Tools; (10) Groupware Services; (11) Groupware Applications, and (12) Collaborative Internet-Based Applications.
There are also attempts to classify all collaborative tools more detailed. For instance Byron and Baecker (www.dgp.utoronto.ca/people/byron/webnet/ Taxonomy.html: May 2001) describe 21 groups, concentrating on communication aspects of group work and using various factors like style of conversation (Person-to-person; Broadcast; Forum) etc.
The most detailed are structural taxonomies, such as one created within the Siemens research project by Jarczyk, Löffler, and Völksen (1992). There are some major classes of criteria, which have two levels of subclasses. The functional criteria refer to the features of groupware tools; the technical criteria characterize the platform, and the architecture of the system. The application criteria refer to the application domain. There are also usability and ergonomic criteria, and two meta-criteria Orthogonality and Scalability, which focus on the flexibility of the system. Other classifications are:
- Taxonomy based on people and artifact framework, which classify all software into three groups: User-centered tools, Work-or-object centered tools, and Process-centered tools (the last one with subclasses: Electronic Mail and Messaging; Conferencing; Group Decision Support Systems; Group Document Handling; Workflow; Workgroup Utilities and Development Tools; Groupware Frameworks; Groupware
Service; and Groupware Application)
- ‘Locus of Control’ classification, which also divide collabware into three main groups: Computer-mediated communication, Meeting and decision support systems, and Shared application and artifacts;
- Roger Whitehead’s classification based on how tools contribute to the end users and how they enhance human capabilities: Tools (shared documents); Channels (e-mail and database access); Structures (text conferencing and outlining tools); Process (Group Support Systems).
Existing classifications are generally not oriented towards any specific discipline (except e-business in some cases). They focus on communication or collaboration processes as a whole. There are no taxonomies of engineering collaboration tools, classified from engineers’- or architect’s point of view. Besides, the existing groupware classifications (and portal services’ ones) concentrate rather on communication aspects than on data management, although in fact the collaborative data management is the challenge in existing engineering software development.
The Typology of Collaborative
Architectural Information
Management Tools
In the paper the preliminary Typology of Collaborative Architectural Information Management Tools is suggested.
The subject: Architectural Information Management Tools extraction
The typology classifies software tools and services offered by engineering portals, and partially by CAD and PDM applications, focusing on Architectural Information Management Tools (AIM). The introductory, pre-ordered (according to Communication/Data/Administration factors) typology of all collaborative tools is presented in Table 1.
Table 1. A list of collaborative tools.
The above list must be completed with more detailed list of CAD-oriented and multi-task tools, specific for AEC portals, because they are usually not mentioned in existing taxonomies, and because of the great development of these tools and their importance for engineering collaborative work. CAD tools are generically oriented (and they are mainly data-management-oriented in some aspects, although there is no strict division into data-management and no-data-management tools). Table 2 contains an open list of these tools, ordered according to tasks they perform.
The classification factors
A great variety of different portal services makes them difficult to classify. The existing classifications of
collabware/groupware concentrate on some aspects of the tools, especially on communication processes, bypassing other aspects, like data management. That is why extracting classification factors, essential for engineering data management, is needed. All main factors might be:
- Human-Human Interaction-Specific factors (time/ place/interaction type)
- Human-Computer Interaction-Specific factors (interfaces, personal access)
- Data-Specific factors (data type, data access type) The combinations of the mentioned factors create the Interactions Table (Table 3).
Table 2. An open list of AEC-specific data management tools (may overlap each other and overlap partially with tools from Table 1).
Discussion
The mentioned taxonomy doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive or finished. It is an open taxonomy, allowing to divide interactions groups and services into more detailed units. The open and interaction-specific approach seems to suite best for portal services, which are changing and evolving rapidly. Each service’s placement in the taxonomy can be discussed, because most services are internally complex and do not fall into strict categories.
More detailed investigation on services, including the taxonomy, is needed in the future.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by rector’s grant at Bialystok University of Technology (Faculty of Architecture), Grant No. W/WA/4/00, funded by Polish Research Council in the 2001 year,
References
Bergman, R. and Baker, J.D.: 2000, Enabling collaborative engineering and science at JPL, Advances in Engineering Software, 31(8-9), pp. 661-668
Carrabine, L.: 2000, Empowering Collaboration: The Move Online, in: www.cadenceweb.com/ features/mcad_collab/carrabine.html
DeSanctis, G. and Gallupe, B.: 1987, A foundation for the study of group decision support systems. Management Science, 33(5), pp.589-609
http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP157.html http://hsb.baylor.edu/ramsower/ais.ac.97/papers/
nickers.htm
Jarczyk, A., Löffler, P., Völksen, G.: 1992, Computer Supported Cooperative Work: State-of-the-Art and Suggestions for Future Work, Internal Report, Version 1.0, of the Siemens UPN-CSCW-Project, Munich
Kao, Y and Lin, G.: 1998, Development of a collaborative CAD/CAM system, Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, (14) pp.55-68
Laiserin, J.: Technology for collaboration, in: DIGITAL ARCHITECT, www.archrecord.com/ DIGITAL/DA_ARTIC/DA03_01.ASP Malone, T.W. and Crowston, K.: 1994, The
Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination, in: ACM Computing Surveys, 26 (1), pp.87-119 Nickerson, S.: 1997, A Taxonomy of Group
Computing Applications, in: Group Computing Magazine September/October pp. 31-33. Szewczyk, J.: 2001: Portale inzynierskie (2), in:
CADCAM Forum, 5/2001 pp.46-49 www.extranets.cc/the_list/ 3dshare_to__zoomon.htm www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~voelksen/ publications/wmwork/www/approach_9.html www.ics.uci.edu/~grudin/Papers/IEEE94/ IEEEComplastsub.html www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs6751_97_fall/ projects/abowd_team/ivan/final.h
Table 3. The general idea of portal services’ taxonomy based on interaction factors
