MOBILE APPLICATION TO COLLECT INFORMATION ABOUT ARCHITECTURE TO OBTAIN A COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE BASE. ar:searchbox.app

During the early stages of the architectural design process, students and architects seek information for inspiration, and to evaluate design ideas or similar solutions. An essential part of design education therefore involves building up a knowledge base of already built or designed buildings. Most students gather such information by visiting or researching building designs, for example through photos taken on design studio field trips. These photos are used for studio work or archived for later use. The “ar:searchbox.app” aims to support this in two ways. Firstly, by supporting easy mobile information acquisition and sharing, as well as the semi-automatic derivation of high quality metadata; and secondly, 2 LANGENHAN, SAHM, PETZOLD AND SEIFERT, TEICHERT by employing urban environment sensitive search and similarity-based browsing strategies to support mobile education as well as a webbased access to the information. To provide long-term access and to establish an information base that is not restricted to a single design studio, the “ar:searchbox.app” builds on our previous “ar:searchbox” project which uses a central media server called “mediaTUM” that provides a handling concept for flexible metadata schemas and scalable infrastructures.