Durable Architectural Knowledge

Along with the paradigm shift that changed the way of architectural drafting from 2D analog plans and scale models over 2D digital plans to complex digital 3D models, the importance for libraries, museums, and archives for long-term preservation of architectural digital 3D models was recognized some years ago. To this end, research projects trying to set up a process to capture, describe, manage, preserve, and make available digital CAD models created by architects during building projects were established in the United States as well as in Europe. Despite the shift from analog to digital representations, the access mechanisms of current long-term archiving systems in the architectural domain are still based on simple metadata schemes inherited from the analog world and therefore limited in the same way as searching with a card index in the analog age. The potential inherent in a full digital representation is not exploited so far as detailed semantic information in the digital documents is either not available or simply not used for retrieval. In the DuraArK project we will develop a long-term preservation system for architectural content that will overcome these shortcomings. It will allow searching and accessing data on different semantic levels going far beyond the possibilities of currently used metadata schemes. At the same time, it will provide secure and future-proof data storage by tackling the problems arising from digital decay.