Towards Semantic Grid in Construction Informatics

Civil Engineering increasingly requires efficient Virtual Organizations of heterogeneous partners and facilities. Mainly four software architecture paradigms originating from the area of distributed computing have influenced the implementation of supporting software systems for Virtual Organizations: Grid, Peer-to-Peer, Agent as well as Web Service architectures. Each architecture paradigm accounts for different technical aspects that promote the realization of such software systems. The unification of these paradigms towards an integrated architecture has, to date, not been achieved. This keynote paper summarizes the stateof-the-art architecture paradigms and proposes elementary design issues for an integrating architecture. This architecture incorporates ontologies for regulating the communication and interoperability among different services. An application scenario finally demonstrates the usage of such an architecture.