D24: Guide for tools and services delivery - VTTcic.vtt.fi/projects/icci/deliverables/icci_d24.pdf · D24: Guide for tools and services delivery ICCI: IST-2000-33022 3 service. There

IST-2000-33022

Classification: [Public]

D24: Guide for tools and services delivery

Author(s): Žiga Turk Tomo Cerovšek Vlado Stankovski

(all University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Issue Date December 1st 2003 Version V1.00 Deliverable Number D24 Task Number T24 Status Issued

D24: Guide for tools and services delivery ICCI: IST-2000-33022

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Summary The goal of this report is to define “ICCI IT services platform” - a set of guidelines to what platforms should software developed in the ICCI projects as well as any future projects be adapted. The task also will encompass transversal integration of various technologies in order to lead to demonstrators preparing the emergence of new services and/or new infrastructures.

The report particularly builds on top of the reports D221"ICT Standards" [1] that described the relevant standards, D23 "Synthesis of ICCI ICT Infrastructures - for Building and Construction Industry" [2] that summarised the current ICT infrastructures of ICCI projects and the D222 Market Watch [3], that described the current state of the art of such platforms in the industry.

The title speaks of “tools and services delivery”. By the term tool we understand a program that is owned by the actor executing it. It is installed on a local machine or a local server. By the term service we understand software, information or knowledge that is offered on the Internet within the company but typically by a service provider. By the term web service we adhere to the W3C definition that a Web service is "software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML and that renders its results in XML". By the term platform we understand an environment in which tool, a service or web service runs. The trend in the tools and services evolution (see D222) is that the difference between the two is increasingly reduced.

Delivery of tools

A growing trend in the software markets is the transition towards open systems and non-windows environments, particularly Linux, however studies are finding that due to the lack of industry standard applications Linux is not a viable platform for AEC environments. It is the recommendation of the ICCI project that any software developed in the research projects should be: platform independent (written in Java or on top of another platform independent tool

such as TCL/Tk, Perl, MySQL) open source. Majority of funding of an EU project is public and (at least some of) the

software should be placed under an open source license. feature XML read/write. Ideally vertical standards such as the IFC should be complied

with, however, by strictly using the XML schema compliant XML input and output, the systems integrators could benefit from the huge toolchest of XML related tools to integrate the tool with any given environment.

Delivery of services

All that applies to tools applies to services as well. While mission critical software remains to be workstation based (Office programs, 3D modeler etc.) in increasing number of exotic, seldom used engineering functionality is available using the services paradigm - meaning that a particular functionality, computation, communication or information is provided on the Internet, using the Web at least to reach the service and establish communication with the


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service. There is a number of competing platform frameworks at different technical levels, and openness, for example: Loosely coupled frameworks: Web services with its core technologies SOAP, WSDL

and UDDI; Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP); JCP/JSR-168 (Java Community Process / Java Specification Request)

Tightly coupled frameworks: Corba; .NET platform; J2EE These frameworks are increasingly providing applications for AEC (i.e. Citadon, that provides SOAP based services). Recently, several successful complementary solutions are becoming increasingly popular, for example: peer-to-peer solutions (Groove), real-time-collaboration (Netmeeting), and thin clients (Windows terminal server). Developments around the Microsoft Office Server technologies should be carefully monitored as well.

On minimum, services should be XML-RPC or better SOAP compliant and their descriptions in WSLD should be available. If a service has significant presentation aspects compliance with the WSRP is recommended.

The current state of the art as well as state of the standards is still rather unstable. Microsoft is emerging as a market and tool leader in Web services development, integration and use.

However, it has not been proven yet that the loosely coupled web services paradigm is suitable for industrial AEC environments. An interesting development that could have a huge impact on interoperability and collaboration in AEC is the grid paradigm. Particularly the semantic grids could provide reliable, redundant, safe environments that combine the scalability of computing and storage capacity of grid computing with the management of semantically rich information defined in AEC product model standards.

Keywords platform, services, web services, tools, software architectures, interoperability, SOAP, UDDI, grid

Document Revision Sheet version date comment

0.90 30.11.2003 first version

0.91 1.12.2003 added a section on grid platforms

0.92 5.12.2003 took comments from internal review into account

1.00 19.12.2003 released version


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Contents SUMMARY............................................................................................................................. 2

KEYWORDS .......................................................................................................................... 3

DOCUMENT REVISION SHEET....................................................................................... 3

CONTENTS............................................................................................................................ 4

1. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................. 6

1.1 OBJECTIVES..................................................................................................................... 6 1.2 TARGET AUDIENCE .......................................................................................................... 6 1.3 DEFINITIONS.................................................................................................................... 6

2. GENERAL REMARKS..................................................................................................... 7

2.1 BOUNDARY CONDITIONS ................................................................................................. 7 2.2 USE OF STANDARDS......................................................................................................... 7 2.3 IPR ISSUES....................................................................................................................... 7

3. TOOLS AND SERVICES PARADIGM.......................................................................... 9

3.1 SCHEMA .......................................................................................................................... 9 3.2 PLATFORMS ..................................................................................................................... 9 3.3 INTERACTION WITH ENVIRONMENT ................................................................................. 9

3.3.1 With the file system .............................................................................................................. 9 3.3.2 Interaction with time and document management systems................................................ 10 3.3.3 Interaction with product databases ................................................................................... 10 3.3.4 Interaction with collaboration suites................................................................................. 10

3.4 SERVICES....................................................................................................................... 10 3.4.1 Sample platform for service based computing................................................................... 11

4. GRID PLATFORM.......................................................................................................... 12

4.1 GRIDS AND SEMANTIC GRIDS ......................................................................................... 13 4.2 VISION OF A GRID PLATFORM......................................................................................... 14 4.3 GOALS OF A GRID PLATFORM......................................................................................... 15 4.4 GRID STANDARDS .......................................................................................................... 15 4.5 DRAFT GRID PLATFORM................................................................................................. 16


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4.6 DISCUSSIONS ................................................................................................................. 18

5. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS......................................................... 19

5.1 RECOMMENDATION ....................................................................................................... 19

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................. 21

7. REFERENCES................................................................................................................. 22


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1. Introduction

1.1 Objectives

RTD projects in ICCI have defined a number of tools and services that may not be interoperable. The goal of this report is to define “ICCI IT services platform”, which can be implemented as the lowest common denominator of similar platforms developed in the ICCI projects as well as any future projects. The task will also encompass transversal integration of various technologies in order to lead to demonstrators preparing for the emergence of new services, tools and/or new ICT infrastructures.

1.2 Target audience

The target audience of this report are: • IT industry selling software and services to the AEC industry, • CIOs and others in AEC companies making IT purchasing decisions • Authors of prototypes in future EU projects

1.3 Definitions

By the term tool we understand a program that is owned by the actor executing it. It is installed on a local machine or on a local server.

By the term service we understand software, information or knowledge that is offered on the Internet either within a company but typically by a service provider.

By the term web service we adhere to the W3C definition that a Web service is "software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML and that renders its results in XML".

By the term platform we understand an environment in which a service or web service runs. As described in the D222 as well as in this report, the trend in the information technologies is that the differences between tools and services are being reduced.

By the term schema we understand a definition of the structure of information.

By the term "model based" we understand software that is based on an explicit high level schema that includes concepts from the engineering domain. Therefore, software that deals with lines, rectangles or cubes is not "model based" while software that deals with columns, beams, doors and windows is.


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2. General remarks

2.1 Boundary conditions

The IT industry is progressing at a very high pace, often subject to inventing hyped technologies that do not deliver their initial promise. While the top software companies can follow the fashionable trends, the software companies providing AEC software are often small and may have problems introducing new technologies on a yearly basis. It is not uncommon for the typical workhorses in engineering software to be written in FORTRAN, not in C, C++ or even C#. The recommendations of this report take this into account and do not propose the use of technologies that have not yet been proven and are not yet supported by the mainstream software developments.

2.2 Use of standards

One could observe a correlation between the ease with which information related standards can be created and the number of those standards that are being proposed. The XML, particularly the XML Schema technology is very suitable for the creation of standards. These standards do not standardise the available, industrially accepted technology, but label some development with the term "standard" hoping that this will contribute to the industrial acceptance of some technology. Generally, the developments should be compatible with (1) open standards, (2) neutral standards, (3) industry standards - in this order.

2.3 IPR issues

Open source concept has spawned all mayor Internet technologies and given the fact that the majority of funding of EU project comes from public funding, at least some resulting software should be placed under the open source license. It may also have significant economic impacts4.

Open Source provides marketing opportunities for start-up companies but it is unlikely that highly complex engineering software with the necessary levels of reliability will ever be available as open source.

By placing software into the open source, the project is:

• subjecting the software to a peer review of a large community of potential users; • forced to provide documentation, that will enable 3rd parties to understand the

software; • is providing an exploitation perspective outside of the consortium; • is making sure that similar projects will not need to re-invent the wheel.

One could argue that because of the industrial involvement in the project consortia, things simply should not be placed under the open source license. This is definitely true for software that is developed by the industrial partners in the project, however, the software that is developed by the fully funded academic and research partners should be placed under the open source. This would act as a pressure on the industrial partners to take the issues of


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exploitation very seriously, because someone third may just take the source and build on top of it.

EU should fund the development of strategic, enabling key software components under the open source model that could later spin-off into commercial developments outside the consortium; the open source is particularly valid because many project have problems with realistic exploitation plan.


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3. Tools and services paradigm Tools and services may be merging but for some time to come users will want to have the mission critical software on their desktops. This software, however, will be increasingly open for collaboration with the information on the Internet as, last but not least, demonstrated by the latest version of MS Office.

3.1 Schema

Jotting custom made express of IDEF0 diagrams remains a frequent task of several researchers in construction IT. With each such diagram one should be able to argue, why a custom made diagram was made and why not some openly available schema was not re-used. Both the work in the IFC as well as the numerous schema defined in the W3C offer a huge library of predefined, ready to use schemata. The list of priorities should be (in the order of preference):

• use an existing AEC specific schema, • use a ready made schema, defined in XML, • invent a new schema, but in a way that is compatible with, for example, the IFCs and

can potentially lead to standardisation within IFC • use XML schema • use XML for all information in/out operations

See the D221 for a discussion of relevant standards.

3.2 Platforms

Linux is not a viable platform for the majority of AEC applications5. Only the Wintel and to some extent the Mac platforms provide the mission critical software for AEC. AUtoCAD, ArchiCAD, Primavera, ProEngineer and a bunch of planning, estimating and structural analysis applications do not run on Linux. There is not reason that the EU funded projects should ignore this fact.

Another important "platforms" for the tools are applications or application suites that allow programmatic extensions or programming add-on applications. It is up to the exploitation plans of the industrial partners if the development should be targeted towards platforms such as AutoCADs, Primavera's, MS Office's, Groove's etc. Particularly when collaboration environments are in question, there should exists very good reasons for "from the scratch" development of planning, scheduling, communication, digital signature etc. systems.

3.3 Interaction with environment

3.3.1 With the file system

Read/write in readable format, XML compliant input/output. Ideally, of course, tools should write product model data into a product model database, however, this makes them dependent


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on that particular database. By strictly using the XML-schema-compliant XML-input and -output, the systems integrators could benefit from the huge toolbox of XML related tools to integrate their tool with the given environment.

XML can be very space consuming for some kinds of engineering data ... tag:content ratio of 3:1 is considered quite good.

3.3.2 Interaction with time and document management systems

Operating systems such as Windows and also products such as BackOffice are increasingly getting the functionality of a document management system. Mail clients are moving into the direction of workflow systems. Building on top of these systems could shorten the learning path of users who all use this systems, indeed currently on a very primitive level.

3.3.3 Interaction with product databases

Product model databases (particularly IFC databases) are rapidly developing right at this time. They can be regarded as quite immature products with market leaders yet to emerge. A definition of an abstract API to such databases is an important future development that could rely on relevant work in the XML domain, particularly the Xpath and XQL.

3.3.4 Interaction with collaboration suites

"Building—or at least improving—the integration of collaborative tools with enterprise applications will be among the greatest challenges facing companies in the coming year6." In times when on-line collaboration was not in the focus of the development of the general tools, construction IT research has developed its own collaboration environments. Now more stable frameworks are available around products such as Lotus Notes, Groove, MS Project Office. In the past, betting on the Microsoft platforms has paid.

3.4 Services

Service based computing is becoming mainstream. Customisation and extensions of office automation software is increasingly through Web services. AEC software should follow. Providing SOAP interfaces and their WSDL descriptions is not all that difficult. The two major threats to service based computing are security and monopolisation by a single vendor. None has any direct consequences to the AEC market. One of the crucial decisions that has to be made in this context is what services platform should a software house write for and what platform should be introduce in a AEC company.

Currently there is a number of competing platforms or frameworks at different technical complexity levels, and varying openness and extendibility that are discussed below:

• Loosely coupled frameworks. These frameworks can establish communication at runtime, without, for example, a recompile of the software. Typical examples are Web services with core technologies based on SOAP, WSDL and UDDI standards.


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• Tightly coupled frameworks. Based on Corba; .NET platform; J2EE and similar. Generally more complex to use but faster and more efficient.

• Portal frameworks such as the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification defines a web service interface for accessing and interacting with interactive presentation-oriented web services. Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) and Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) aim to simplify the integration effort through a standard set of web service interfaces allowing integrating applications to quickly exploit new web services as they become available7.

3.4.1 Sample platform for service based computing

At Purdue University a core network computing infrastructure (PUNCH) was created. PUNCH is a platform for Internet computing that turns the World Wide Web into a distributed computing portal8. Users can access and run programs via standard Web browsers. Applications can be installed "as is" in as little as thirty minutes. Machines, data, applications, and other computing services can be located at different sites and managed by different entities. PUNCH provides Web access to applications that range from commercial CAD packages such as Ansys and Mentor Graphics to custom programs such as Schred (a Shroedinger-Poisson solver) and nanoMOS (a Green's function simulator for nano-MOSFETs) to productivity applications such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice suite.


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4. Grid platform The integration of the AEC industry and the interoperability of the hundreds of software applications supporting the design and construction of the built environment have been providing one of the most challenging environments for the application of information and communication technologies. Today, technical solutions for interoperability range from file format translators, local databases, document management systems, project Webs, workflows, planning and scheduling systems to complex Web services and ORB's. These need individual installation, access, configuration and expertise to be used. Integration of some these components has been demonstrated in FP4 and FP5 projects but is far from being robust and easy to implement and use.

Any construction project is performed by a virtual organization consisting of dozens or even hundreds of companies, consultants, SMEs etc. It has been found out by several strategic documents (Smith, 2001) that the problem of this industry is coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual enterprises. The sharing includes access to computers, software, data, people and other resources, as is required by a range of collaborative design and problem-solving strategies. The key to an efficient collaboration is the shared semantics of the data, enabled by a common information model and/or ontology. AEC problems are often three dimensional with million degrees of freedom, which require for their handling high performance computational units. The modelling and solving often require resource sharing across institutional boundaries.

Given the requirements outlined above, grids could ensure the interoperability and collaboration platform providing that they include the key ingredient required for a complex engineering virtual organization - the support for the shared semantics (Sowa, 1984, Guarino et al., 1997). It is in this area where we believe innovation and extension of the current grid architectures is required.


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4.1 Grids and semantic grids

Figure 1. Three popular networked computing paradigms.

Grid is a type of parallel and distributed system that enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed "autonomous" resources dynamically at runtime depending on their availability, capability, performance, cost, and users' quality-of-service requirements (http://www.gridcomputing.com/). The term, grid computing, has become one of the latest buzzwords in the IT industry. Grid computing is an innovative approach that leverages existing IT infrastructure to optimize compute resources and manage data and computing workloads. According to Gartner, "a grid is a collection of resources owned by multiple organizations that is coordinated to allow them to solve a common problem." Gartner further defines three commonly recognized forms of grid:

• Computing grid - multiple computers to solve one application problem • Data grid - multiple storage systems to host one very large data set • Collaboration grid - multiple collaboration systems for collaborating on a common

issue (http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/grid/). Grid computing has its origins in solving computationally intensive problems and is well documented in papers and books (Foster and Kesselman, 1999). Recent developments and trends of grid computing go beyond the solving of data (petabytes) or computationally (teraflops) problems for scientists and engineers towards making grids a suitable business infrastructure for virtual organizations. Grids are increasingly viewed as services (Foster et al., 2002) aware of the business semantics. Semantic grids should provide to the grids what the semantic Web is providing to the Web - communication based on high level, meaningful entities. Convergence of grid technology and the Web services (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) technology is demonstrated in toolkits such as Globus (2003) that implement the Open Grid Services Architecture OGSA (2003) and are compatible with SOAP, WSDL and UDDI - the pillars of the Web services architecture. Main features of the "grid services" infrastructure are that

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(1) a whole grid can be regarded as one Web service, (2) individual core grid functions have a Web services like interface and (3) existing Web services can become grid enabled and make use of grid's virtualization,

scalability and security mechanisms. A related concept to semantic grids is "cognitive grid" (Kesselman, 2001) that is sometimes understood as intelligent management of grid resources. Among the numerous research projects in the EU, the US and beyond, some are particularly relevant: The GEODISE project (Grid Enabled Optimization and Design Search for Engineering) was one of the first to explore the possibilities of the semantic grid, however, the semantics was being attached to files as metadata. True semantic-rich information is not addressed. The myGrid project defined its architecture using the OGSA architecture but does not seem to be based on a common ontology. The COG project has similar goals to Grid research, but is addressing a different business sector and seems to be primarily concerned with the heterogonous data formats and not heterogonous information schema addressed in Grid research.

The only grid project related to the AEC sector that we are aware of is the NSF funded SCEC/IT (Information Infrastructure for Earthquake Research). The rather broad and practical goal is to "provide information technology infrastructure for earthquake research, including knowledge representation and reasoning, Grid technologies, digital libraries, and interactive knowledge acquisition".

4.2 Vision of a grid platform

In a hospital project, for example, collaboration of experts from fields of urban planning, local authorities, social security and health insurance, architecture, structural engineering, medicine, medical technology, hygiene, HVAC, accounting, law etc. is required. No two hospitals are the same. For no two hospitals, the same team of experts enumerated above would be called in. The group of companies and contractors involved would be different each time. Some, like the chief designer or main contractor would stay on the project longer, some would just come in, do their job, and get out; quickly and dynamically. They need a platform, which lets them get in and out of an extremely complex virtual enterprise, built around complex, structured information. Like plugging a power cord into a wall socket for electricity. Like plugging into the grid!

The vision of the use of grids in AEC is to provide infrastructure where a user would simply get building information model information from the grid and also put it there. The complexity of the IT, the internet, that will be used to physically store this information, protect it, make it available to others etc. would be totally hidden from the end user. The location of information and software resources would be “the grid” not a server on some IP number somewhere, but a robust, reliable, secure, scalable “grid”, very likely redundantly distributed across several severs around the internet. She would use terms from her professional vocabulary, from an engineering ontology, to find relevant information. Similarly, software authors would make the software semantically compliant with the standard building model and technically compliant with the grid. The "Save As ..." option


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would be replaced by "Send to grid" and the "Load ..." with an ontology aware query mechanism, that would search the grid for relevant information.

4.3 Goals of a grid platform

The long term practical goal of the grid related research in AEC is to provide traditional industries such as construction stable, co-allocated, reliable, unified, adaptive, remote, ambient accessible, interoperable, pay-per-demand access to (1) information, (2) communication and (3) processing infrastructure in thus finally provide integration and interoperability infrastructure. This goal cannot be achieved by a single research project. The work should focus on the enablers for this paradigm shift - from internet and web services - to the grid. The enablers are researchers, standardization bodies and key software developers. They need a reference grid, which will be in a position to provide the strategic steering of their future developments.

The key scientific question addressed to be addressed is how grid technology can be used to address the interoperability of software and services working with complex and semantically rich information, in addition to distributed processing power that can crunch this information. This should be done in an environment characterised by some standard data structures that are undergoing a dynamic evolution. Conceptually, we believe that there is a need for an ontic level above the information schema level. This should be done by extending the OGSA with common grid semantics.

The key technological objective is to make the grid infrastructure available to the mostly SME companies that are providing the engineering software and whose speciality may be topics like structural mechanics or 3D solid modelling and not latest trends in middleware technology. The results of the technical work would be to show how typical server side applications or components of applications can be made grid-computing compatible and how the mostly client side applications can interface with the grid. The project will provide the necessary libraries, toolkits and guidelines.

4.4 Grid standards

Grid (Services) Computing is based on an open set of standards and protocols (i.e., Open Grid Services Architecture: OGSA) that enable communication across heterogeneous, geographically dispersed IT environments. The current trend is to produce a broader set of standards that cover all aspects of Grid technologies (computational, data storage, networking and web services). This effort is articulated through the Global Grid Forum. AEC researchers should access to these forums to promote the international relevance of Grid research and contribute to the emerging standards.

The focus should be the proposal of semantic extensions to the OGSA specification. Currently OGSA's ontology is technical - it speaks of services, protocols, processes, computers etc. We suggest to build the semantic deep into the core of the grid standards so that any grid related service or protocol can have a meaningful "business" role. Our current idea is to allow for an


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arbitrary ontology, specified in one of the well established ontology languages, become part of the very fabric of the grid.

4.5 Draft grid platform

As discussed Recent developments in the grid community extended the architecture towards the services paradigm that is a prerequisite for semantic grid. Figure 1 shows this architecture. We believe that if the grid is supposed to become an integrative element for virtual organization (VO), the notion of the business concepts of this VO should be an integral part of the grid. We suggest to achieve this by adding an ontology layer into the grid that would allow for any grid service to know what business relevant some data or process has. The layer would be made available to other functionality through an ontology server. Particularly important is this service to the database services of the grid, however, several functions of the grid (MDS, GRAM) could work more intelligently, if they are aware of the business context.

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Figure 2. Extensions (white) of the current grid architectures (grey) to support semantic collaboration.

Interoperability in AEC today, at best relies on the management of IFC files. Attempts to use true IFC databases are academic. Environments are fragile and depend on a single server that provides such crucial functions as information and process management for a complex project. Grid research suggests using the grid as a robust, scalable, safe infrastructure for the AEC industry. It would allow seamless integration of software committing to the IAI standards and focus the developers into the functionality and not data exchange or interfacing with this or that information server. The grid is the place for the data

Currently there are a few companies providing ASP services and project webs to engineering communities that allow collaboration and information sharing. The grid will extend this concept towards true resource sharing and on-demand resource renting. This will allow for new business models to be developed as well as the rethinking of the IT infrastructures in the industry. Grids could provide the necessary robustness as well as security (through the X.509 mechanism) that would make outsourcing the IT infrastructure a more realistic option than today when they have to rely on a multitude of chaotically interwoven services.

The grid research in AEC should introduce two major improvements visible to the end user as well as the application developer:


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1. The grid infrastructure eliminates the need of knowing exact locations of semantically rich data and complex problem solving services. They are "on the grid".

2. The ontology reduces the need to know the exact structure and access paths of the data in product model databases. They can be accesses by using an engineering ontology as opposed object names and record keys.

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Figure 3. The AEC grid infrastructure (middle) with grid-side servers (below) and workstation side clients.

In Figure 3, the users are using the applications. These applications need information and functionality from the outside of the user's workstation, from the grid. The applications therefore have a workstation component and the grid based component. The communication media between the workstation and the grid is the Internet and the workstation applications, their grid based counterparts, as well as the grid only services are connected to the grid with a series of interfaces. At the very bottom there are numerous computers on which these "grid side" services run. Workstations would typically not know on which machine the service is running. Computationally intensive services would run on several in parallel, big databases would be spread across several machines. Simple services would have redundant backups in case of computer or network failures.

Any prototyping should therefore develop these components:


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grid enabled workstation applications (the first three from the left) that connect to a grid through a

specialised semantic grid adapter for each application. This adapter talks to the workstation-side semantic grid client common to all applications on a workstation. Over the internet, this client connects to

server side semantic grid server. It would run on machines providing grid-enabled services.

semantic grid adapter will be used by services that are to made grid enabled. specialised core servers, such as the product database and an ontology server. This

software may not have a workstation component other than some administration interface

Together the above forms a semantic collaboration grid.

4.6 Discussions

In spite of successful pilots, the AEC industry lacks a robust collaboration infrastructure. Grids are the latest hyped technology that promises the solution to this decades old problem allowing both the researchers as well as the industry to capitalize on the development in standards of the past decades. A grid is a natural transition path for the project webs and application service providers. In this paper we have not been mentioning a very clear potential that the grid has for the providers of complex numerical and modeling software that is truly hungry for processing power and gigaflop computers.

Research in the field of grids in AEC is just starting. An EU project has been proposed, AEC partners have been involved in the preparation of a Grid integrated project. There is at least one national grid related project (in Slovenia – www.gridforum.si) seriously is focusing on the AEC aspects of the grid. However, grid research in AEC is still rather new. The vision shared by the authors of this paper is that the AEC community should work towards a single AEC grid in which or various services and software could be plugged in and not repeat the mistakes of the various “integration” projects that developed their own collaboration infrastructures from scratch. This paper is therefore proposing the establishing of aec.gridforum , to coordinate and harmonize grid efforts in AEC as well as to show the general grid community, that to support, with grid technology, virtual organizations of a particular domain, domain specific solutions, particularly those related to domain ontologies, should be built into the fabric of the grid.


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5. Conclusions and recommendations The current state of the art as well as state of the standards is still very dynamic and volatile. Clear market leaders are emerging just now. This poses a big problem for the typically very small engineering software developers who do not have the resources to invest into mastering a complex interoperability standard that has little to do with their core engineering expertise and that may in the future not be adopted as the industry standard.

The implementation of the services as well as of the current platforms are still rather primitive and it needs yet to be proved if their use is suitable for a highly volatile and dynamic environment, such as construction. Security issues provide an additional argument for caution. The inclusion of a service into an enterprise portal, if this is done once and for all, may work, however, ad-hoc collecting of semantically complex services may not be as simple. None of the technologies addressed has any notion of the semantic complexity of the data managed by engineering software. The services are at fixed URI locations, often served by an SME's that do not have the most reliable infrastructure and load management.

We believe that the platforms for the support of collaboration and interoperability in the AEC are yet to be developed and that a research effort is required in the field of semantic grids - safe, reliable, redundant, clustered environments that combine the scalability of computing and storage capacity of grid computing with the management of semantically rich information defined in AEC product model standards such as STEP and IFC.

5.1 Recommendation

Platform: Since 2000 when ICCI proposal was written, a lot has happened in the field of collaboration, interoperability and services platforms. This type of computation is becoming mainstream and software such as the Windows operating systems, Office and Outlook, Groove, Lotus Notes, Citadon etc. are becoming a suitable "platform" into which vertical AEC specific applications could be plugged in. It is not likely that an AEC research project can create a platform of similar stability, feature set and market potential as those mentioned.

Should a need arise to define a platform from scratch the following environments should be taken into account.

• Raw SOAP/WSDL. They getting broad adoption, in particular by market leaders such as Microsft, IBM and Oralce. Services should be compatible with these standards and should, more specifically, be compatible with specific APIs defined by Office or Oracle. SOAP/WSDL is support by application development environments such is .NET SDK, Delphi, Perl, Java ...

• An interesting, very simple but powerful alternative to SOAP is REST (REpresentational State Transfer)9. Suitable for research work but yet to demonstrate a proven market potential.

• Apache Axis is SOAP compliant a Java platform for creating and deploying web services applications.


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• Kinzan Application Framework uses a component model called Adaptive Web Services. The framework is designed to extend service-oriented architectures.

• Webswell provides integration of software applications by using webservices and ebXML.

Grids are a serious alternative to services based infrastructure for AEC collaboration. Extending a grid infrastructure, such as Globus, with an AEC ontology and process could be an interesting new development.

Tools. There is a need for a creation of a library of open source AEC tools and services, developed in national and EU projects. At least some tools created in the research projects should be placed under an open source license. Tools should read/write XML that has an explicit schema.

Schema. There is a need for a library of AEC specific XML schemas that would allow any developer that did an information analysis of some domain, to publish the schema that was developed. An overview of the bottom-up developed schemata could provide incentive for their standardisation and would encourage re-use rather than re-invention of the schemata. The library could include the schemata developed in IAI-IFC and ISO-STEP.

Data. A library of open access product model data, project planning information and other real world project information would be welcome so that real world data could be used in the testing and analysis of the projects.

The last three items, due to its limited direct market exploitability are also suitable topics for future EU support measures.


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6. Acknowledgements The ICCI Consortium would like to acknowledge the financial support of the European Commission under the IST program.


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7. References

1 Beheshti R, Dado E, Özsariyildiz S, ICT Standards for Construction Projects, ICCI Report D221

2 Beheshti R, Dado E, Özsariyildiz S, Synthesis of ICCI ICT Infrastructures for the BC industry, ICCI Report D23

3 Cerovšek T and Turk Ž, Market Watch, ICCI Report D222.

4 Free Software / Open Source: Information Society Opportunities for Europe?, http://eu.conecta.it/paper/paper.html

5 Geoff Harrod, Linux for CAD, http://www.cadinfo.net/editorial/linux-cad2.htm

6 Michael Caton, A Look Ahead at Collaboration, http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1398569,00.asp

7 http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/3343/oasis-200304-wsrp-specification-1.0.pdf

8 http://punch.purdue.edu/

9 http://conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi

10 Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O (2001). The Semantic Web, A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities, Scientific American, May 2001.

11 De Roure D, Jennings N, Shadbolt N (2003). The Semantic Grid: A Future e-Science Infrastructure : in Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, Wiley & Sons, England.

12 Foster I and Kesselman C editors (1999). The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Morgan-Kaufmann.

13 Foster I, Kesselman C, Nick J, Tuecke S (2002). The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration, Open Grid Service Infrastructure WG, Global Grid Forum, June 22, 2002.

14 Guarino N, Borgo S and Masolo C (1997). "Logical modeling of product knowledge: towards a well-founded semantics for STEP," in Proceedings of the European Conference on Product Data Technology, Sophia Antipolis, France.

15 Globus (2003) http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/

16 Hannus and Sernen (1987) Islands of automation, updated by Hannus, 2000.


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17 John F. Sowa (1984) "Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine", Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

18 Kesselman K (2001). The Cognitive Grid: Grid Services Meet the Semantic Web, University of Southern California.

19 OGSA (2003) http://www.ggf.org/ogsa-wg/

20 Smith, H. (2001). The implications of the Latham, Egan and Urban Task Force reports for interdisciplinary working, Heriot Watt University.

Documents

D24: Guide for tools and services delivery - VTTcic.vtt.fi/projects/icci/deliverables/icci_d24.pdf · D24: Guide for tools and services delivery ICCI: IST-2000-33022 3 service. There