Building Information – Representation and Management: Principles and Foundations for the Digital Era

In contrast to other books on the same subjects, it is not a how-to guide. It does not tell you which software or policies to choose for representing buildings and managing the resulting information. Instead, the book argues that one should not start with these practical steps before fully understanding the reasoning behind any such choice. This includes the structure of information and of the representations that contain it, the purposes of managing information in these representations and the situations in which the representations are used. In a nutshell: how information relates to the cognitive and social processes of a specific domain. Without adequate reasoning that covers all syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects, adopting this software or that and implementing this policy or that simply subjugate information processing to some prescriptive or proscriptive framework that may be unproductive or inappropriate for the domain and its professionals.

To explain these foundations and principles, the book brings together knowledge from various areas, including philosophy and computer science. Its perspective, nevertheless, remains bounded by the application domain: external knowledge is not imposed on domain practices but used to elucidate domain knowledge. Building information has its own peculiarities, drawn more from convention than necessity, and digitization has yet to address such matters, let alone resolve them. General knowledge about information and representation is essential for developing approaches fit for the digital era. The approach advocated in this book is above all parsimonious: in a world inundated with digital information (Part I), one should not resort to brute force and store or process everything. On the contrary, one should organize information intelligently, so that everything remains accessible but with less and more focused effort.