ABSTRACT
However, beside the development of model based systems and common standards in data representation enabling interoperability the progress of web-based project management and collaboration environments is commonly accepted as the other great trend in IT for AEC/FM. Whilst model based systems deal with fully structured data the major task of web-based collaboration systems is the management and exchange of unstructured or semi-structured documents according to the appropriate business processes and the specific roles and tasks of the project participants. Thereby the application of web-based collaboration systems is to date carried out as distributed portal based design environments almost fully disconnected from the offered PDM services. Design and construction processes, typically requiring both model and document information resources are treated separately, distorting the natural manner of cooperative design work. Given the fact that the model based project information becomes more and more complementary to the large amount of project information that is still represented and exchanged in form of unstructured documents this separation between the model-based technology
and the web-based collaboration world contradicts the vision of an integrated information flow throughout the lifecycle of a project.
