Creating information delivery specifications using linked data

The use of Building Information Management (BIM) has become mainstream in many countries. Exchanging data in open standards like the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is seen as the only workable solution for collaboration. To define information needs for collaboration, many organizations are now documenting what kind of data they need for their purposes. Currently practitioners define their requirements often a) in a format that cannot be read by a computer; b) by creating their own definitions that are not shared. This paper proposes a bottom up solution for the definition of new building concepts a property. The authors have created a prototype implementation and will elaborate on the capturing of information specifications in the future

Se ei ole minä, se olet sinä: Tutkimus Venäjän ulkoministeriön strategisesta viestinnästä Covid-19-pandemian aikana

With a tight grip on its political and media landscape, Russian authorities have a history of strictly managing the country’s information space. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated an extra element to consider when conveying a message of effective governance. In order to provide insight in the Russian authorities’ response to this novel cross-border challenge, this thesis examines the framing of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russian foreign policy parlance. It does so by analysing strategic communication efforts and the usage of threat or enmity images therein by the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID RF). To this end, the thesis built on principles from Political Discourse Analysis, which investigates the (re)production and challenging of political power through political discourse. In order to identify the representations of COVID-19 in foreign policy rhetoric, the research made use of the analytical unit of the ‘script’. With the help of the latter, it is possible to recognise which collective understanding is at the basis of the rhetoric that is communicated, i.e. the master narrative. In total, 63 texts were examined. Via analysis of this empirical corpus, 7 scripts were found, which are the ‘Us vs. Them’-script, ‘the West as both a weak and aggressive actor’-script, the ‘politicisation of the pandemic’-script, the ‘promotion of multipolarity’-script, the ‘necessity of international cooperation’-script, the ‘legitimation of the authority of the UN and WHO’-script and ‘Covid-19 as an equaliser’-script. On the basis of these scripts, a master narrative emerged, which declared that Russia, as a geopolitical actor, is actively pursuing a stable and fair world order, but which is at the same time a blameless victim of adversity and enmity. This is in line with previous research on Russian strategic communication and threat perception. Understanding the manner in which this master narrative materialises in foreign policy parlance assists with the interpretation of the general goals the Russian state pursues via its interaction with other states and international organisations

Semantic query languages for knowledge-based web services in a construction context

Since the early 2000s, different frameworks were set up to enable web-based collaboration in building projects. Unfortunately, none of these initiatives was granted a long life. Recently, however, the use of web technologies in the building industry has been gaining momentum again, considered some promising technologies for reaching a more interoperable BIM practice. Specifically, this relates to (1) Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies, and (2) cloud-based applications. In order to combine these into a network of interlinked applications and datastores, an agreed-upon mechanism for automatic communication and data retrieval needs to be used. Apart from the W3C standard SPARQL, often considered too high a threshold for developers to implement, there are some recent GraphQL-based solutions that simplify the querying process and its implementation into web services. In this paper, we review two recent open source technologies based on GraphQL, that enable to query Linked Data on the web: GraphQL-LD and HyperGraphQL

Using the BIM collaboration format in a server based workflow

12th International Conference on Design and Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning, DDSS 2014 This paper describes the research and development of a server based BCF workflow and open source BCF server software. BCF is short for "BIM Collaboration Format" and is an open standard to communicate about the ‘issues’ of a BIM model during its design cycle. Essentially, a BCF issue holds a description of the issue, a status, links to a BIM model and objects, a picture of the issue and a camera orientation. The BCF standard is based on file exchange. BCF issues are packed into a ZIP file (.bcfzip) and sent to project partners. This paper, however, describes the use of the same BCF in a centralized online setting. An open source BCF server was developed, and integrated with an online 3D viewer and BIMserver. Through the BCF server it has been shown that project partners have been able to create issues, manage them online and evaluate them in context of the actual BIM model. Research questions investigated within this project included whether the BCF format is capable of describing the status of building objects in addition to merely describing their issues and to what extent the XML based BCF schema proved to be suitable for a more centralized online storage paradigm. A case study was conducted in order to investigate a suitable workflow for a collaborative design project that involved the online sharing of BIM data, issues, and status. This paper describes the project, the creation of the BCF server, the case study and reports on the results