A Model of Dispersed Historic Architectural Knowledge Base

Abstract

This paper is based on the experience with creation of a small knowledge base about the between-war architecture of one of the Warsaw districts. Design, as a process of creation, combines processing of procedural and declarative knowledge. There is a vast amount of declarative knowledge of different kinds to be collected even before the design process starts. Advances in ICT (Information and Communications Technologies), particularly in such field as databases, data warehousing and knowledge engineering, make it a lot easier to design complex systems, which will allow to combine procedural and declarative knowledge. We used historic-architectural knowledge as an example of the second kind mentioned here. The sources of this kind of information are dispersed, the data is gathered in various formats, using different standards and for various purposes. Past experiences with creating detailed architectural heritage inventories in Poland led us to a conclusion that such a subject specific knowledge base may be a part of larger hierarchical structure, which still needs to be built. These are the reasons for adopting a data-warehouse-like structure, which responds with it’s tools to such needs. The assumptions for such system are presented and the context-based structure is discussed. During our work we also came for some more general conclusions. These concern a need for disseminating an OpenSource Society ideas through all the keepers of information related to architectural heritage.