A Domain-driven Approach to Digital Curation and Preserva- tion of 3D Architectural Data: Stakeholder Identification and Alignment in the DURAARK Project

DURAARK is an interdisciplinary EU FP7 project which researches and develops processes and methods for the digital preservation of architectural three dimensional data. Challenges addressed within the project relate to different aspects of the curation and preservation process, including semantic and geometric enrichment, consistent naming schemas and ontologies, as well as pre-ingest tasks in OAIS compliant digital preservation workflows. In a first step, the project identified stakeholders for methods and processes. Since the project strives for a holistic digital preservation approach, different models were taken into account to align the identified stakeholders with the overall curation and preservation workflow. This alignment leads to a better understanding of stakeholder involvement in the process and of the implications this involvement has on preservation decisions. It furthermore outlines the basis for future work in this area. Introduction In current digital preservation activities there has been a slow shift from a strong cultural heritage involvement towards a growing awareness in various domains with strong electronic output [1]. The architectural domain of today is undoubtedly dominated by electronic output. Architects benefit greatly from the vast amount of different digital representation forms available, enabling them to overlay three-dimensional descriptions with information on the planning and construction processes. The planning, construction and maintenance of a building involves many players, ranging from architects and engineers during the construction phase to building owners and facility managers during the “operation” phase. Figure 1 shows a typical building lifecycle the construction phase, which on average lasts about 2.5 years, consists of the stages where the majority of data is produced. After the handover phase only parts of the data produced during the construction phase may be used regularly – here especially the information relevant to parts requiring ongoing maintenance, such as surfaces, lighting or other exposed parts of the building, may be used regularly. Other information, for example information about structural elements or electrial systems, typically only be relevant in the case of re-purposing or emergency. On average, a building is in use for about 60 years before it is demolished or repurposed. Especially in the case of repurposing, the availability of the original data is an important asset. But other scenarios exist, where the long-term availability of building information is of great value, such as in the case of research of historic building structures or city planning. In the context of preserving the digital output of this domain it is necessary to understand the involved producers as well as potential consumers. Only with an accurate understanding of the stakeholders involved is it possible to meet their needs across curation and preservation activities. The following sections give a brief insight into related work and describe how the current 3D object processing of architectural data of today is a multi-faceted process involving numerous stakeholders. The involved stakeholders are categorized, described and linked to object-centric and process-centric digital preservation and curation models. In a last section, the results are linked to future work to be addressed by the DURAARK project. Background and Related Work Despite the high electronic output of the architectural field, few projects have dealt with the digital curation and preservation of domain innate objects and knowledge. The MIT FAÇADE (Future-proofing Architectural Computer-Aided Design) project dealt specifically with the capture, description, management, Pr eco ns tr uc tio n ph as e D e ig n p h a se Ccept phase Physical nstruction phase H an d o er p h se B u ild in g in u se / M in o r u p g ra d in g o r ch a n g e Re -pu rpo sin g o r