TY - JOUR A1 - Kraft, Bodo A1 - Nagl, Manfred T1 - Visual Knowledge Specification for Conceptual Design: Definition and Tool Support N2 - In: Advanced Engineering Informatics. Vol 21, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 67-83 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2006.10.001 eds. J.C. Kunz, I.F.C. Smith and T. Tomiyama, Elsevier, Seite 1-22 Current CAD tools are not able to support the conceptual design phase, and none of them provides a consistency analysis for sketches produced by architects. This phase is fundamental and crucial for the whole design and construction process of a building. To give architects a better support, we developed a CAD tool for conceptual design and a knowledge specification tool. The knowledge is specific to one class of buildings and it can be reused. Based on a dynamic and domain-specific knowledge ontology, different types of design rules formalize this knowledge in a graph-based form. An expressive visual language provides a user-friendly, human readable representation. Finally, a consistency analysis tool enables conceptual designs to be checked against this formal conceptual knowledge. In this article, we concentrate on the knowledge specification part. For that, we introduce the concepts and usage of a novel visual language and describe its semantics. To demonstrate the usability of our approach, two graph-based visual tools for knowledge specification and conceptual design are explained. KW - CAD KW - CAD KW - Bauingenieurwesen KW - CAD KW - civil engineering Y1 - 2007 UR - https://opus.bibliothek.fh-aachen.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/288 ER -