Issues in Integration of Civil Engineering Services and Tools

Civil Engineering is a discipline providing one of the most challenging environments for integration and interoperability. Great hopes are wired and wireless networking technology that is redefining the role of information technology in civil engineering. It used to provide software tools for the design and analysis and access to common design information. Today, technology is providing the media for accessing information, software, services and also people. In the paper we present efforts of the ISTforCE project to define a framework of this media. ISTforCE is a European 5 Framework Information Society project. It is developing and demonstrating technologies which will enable any computer based engineering tool to be available through the Internet and easily integrated with other tools. The novel approaches in ISTforCE are (1) that one should not provide project centred environments, but that these should be focused on a human, (2) that collaboration environments should be open so that they provide a platform where users and providers of engineering information, services and tools meet clients of such environments are therefore both engineers as well as providers of services, (3) that object level data exchange is possible and (4) that infrastructure for on-line business is provided (legal and financial transactions). In the paper we present the framework and the architecture of the platform.