ARCHINORM: INTELLIGENT WEB SYSTEM FOR SEARCH AND CONCENTRATE URBAN LEGISLATION FOR ARCHITECTS ASSOCIATIONS

Knowing how to comply with existing and active laws regulating the architectural profession is a very complex task. There are many norms, codes and laws, and among themselves they are highly disperse. Repeals are frequent, and imply modifications and amendments which are often hard to locate and interpret, not to mention that they are enacted by different entities. In addition, updated and well-organised versions of these laws and codes aren't published on a regular basis, which forces architects to face the problem of the amount of information and its disparity. Taking into account this problem, associations of architects have identified the need to develop a web application which will allow automatic but precise and efficient online access to legal text and norms with regard to construction and planning projects state, national and regional level in terms of technology and environmental norms, etc. The main goal of the project will be provide a unique web system (a concept mentioned sometimes as ‘”information desk”) which AG’s and architects can use in order to find useful, valuable and user-personalized information related to current laws on record.

The technological objective of the proposed Normgather project lies in the development, verification and validation of an AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven web system that will provide users (architects associations) with a centralised information portal through which they will be able to access any resource needed related to current legislation and norms for a particular area at different levels: (local, regional and national and European). With this system, the problem of disperse information is solved as the system generates the information needed in an accessible and easy to understand way and uniform format. The design of the system will consist of the following parts: - Architect user will be able to input the building characteristics in a user-friendly way. - Regular and automatic indexing of all of the information resources for current laws and norms related to building and construction. - A mechanism which will facilitate the automatic analysis, filtering and classification of the indexed information in a user-friendly manner, drastically decreasing search times and the accuracy of findings. - Comprehension and processing of natural language (starting with English and other European languages) - A back end application to update the system information in a user friendly way. - A feedback system for users which also provides access to specialised consultants. The main goal is to reorganise all the information automatically, not only with standard classic indexing and clustering engines but with user based information and syntactical technologies which will predict the user’s interests and the context of the architectural firms. The results will be a great improvement over existing technology. Technological aspects The project will employ the following technology state of the art technologies: - Natural language processing for user queries at the morphological, syntax and semantic level. - Integration of two models: indexing and advanced information search in “Question-Answer” systems. - Usage of a powerful search engine, such as the one developed by the AOC. - Multi Agent system to search and storage the online digitalized information.

Accessibility to digitalised information
Artificial intelligence
Indexing
Query-Answer and Natural Language processing search
Decision support
Artificial intelligence
Legislation distributed database.

1 RTD: Spanish Research Center playing the coordinator role. 3 SME-AG: Portuguese, Hungarian and Spanish SME Associations of Architects. 3 SMES: Hungarian, Portuguese and Spanish architecture studio and experts