TR144: CIFE iRoom XT Design & Use

During the design and planning process of civil engineering projects a variety of different computer applications are used. Each of these programs models a subset of the overall project's context. For the interdisciplinary tasks discussed in project meetings it is important to identify the existing interrelations between these sub-models of the different applications. The hard- and software for interactive workspaces can be used to link the different application models by modeling the mutual relationships between shared data and can therefore support the decision process through cross-application functionalities. In order to achieve this, the workspace has to be able to distribute data between the connected applications.

This report introduces the iRoom XT framework that we developed to be used within the iRoom, an interactive workspace at the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE). The introduced framework consists of a general, extensible common data model for the central storage of the distributed project data. The data model provides flexibility towards the different scopes and detail levels which may occur within project meetings. Further the iRoom XT framework consists of a messaging system for distributing project data.

While the first part of the report generally describes the ideas behind the framework, the second part of this document consists of manuals. The first of these manuals describes the modeling of projects using the iRoom XT framework. Two other manuals are intended to be a starting point for programmers who wish to enrich the iRoom environments with further functionality.