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G. Suter, A. Mahdavi:
"Generation and Communication of Design Information: A Building Performance Simulation Perspective.";
in: "Proceedings of the 4th Design and Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning Conference", Design and Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning Conference, Maastricht, 1998.

There is general agreement that the process of design and construction of buildings typically involves multiple players. This has been the impetus to develop concepts for computational environments that would support collaborative design. While there has been considerable progress with regard to hardware and electronic communication, the underlying representations of design ideas and artifacts have not kept pace with this progress. In this papper we deal with this problem not from a global conceptual perspective, but rather from the specific point of view of those designers who use design representation toward extraction and manipulation of specialized technical information in terms of geometry (with special focus on topology), materials, systems attributes, etc. We argue that the current building analysis tools do not operate on the basis of such rich informational representations. Instead the needed information is often assembled on an ad hoc basis from various non-integrated informational sources. We review three representations as they are implemented in commercial or research systems and explore their potential for communicating design information to computational building analysis tools. Based on this review, we describe desirable characteristics of more sophisticated building representations.