Architectural Foundations of a Construction Information Network

Integrated information systems for construction products and information will become an important catalyst of the global construction market. In the frame of the European Union's Technology Transfer Network such a one-stop-shop for the construction industry of Europe has been developed. During 1999, partners from the UK, Finland and Slovenia have been working on a pan-European virtual technology park on the Internet CONNET (www.connet.org). CONNET is designed as a set of nodes are integrated on both semantic and technical levels. The first integrates the information offered by the nodes by providing the mapping and translations between the metadata and the classification systems. On the technical level, the services are integrated by providing user management and cross-node searching enabled by publicly defined application interfaces. This paper presents aspects of the design and development of the system. We learned that in integrated, industrywide information systems, several information schemata and classification systems must coexist; that they will not necessarily be based on standardised building product models and existing building product classification systems but on metadata standards developed outside the construction sector. We present an architecture of loosely coupled, federated services on the Web, which are flexible enough to provide a unified interface to various construction related data. The use of open standards for meta-information, Internet technology and an object oriented design and analysis approach proved vital for the success of the project. loosely coupled nodes, operated by the different partners in the project. The