Web-based collaborative system for scene modelling

Abstract

Contemporary scene design problems are inherently complex and require multiple designers to work collaboratively. This chapter is concerned with the contribution to the development of collaborative systems for declarative modelling by hierarchical decomposition in scene modelling. Furthermore, it presents the development and evaluation of an effective collaborative prototype environment which facilitates designers to exchange and share information through the Internet during the design projects. In particular, the implementation of the web-based system concerns the Collaborative Declarative Modelling System framework as an extension of MultiCAD software architecture. This framework is based on a specific module that was designed in order to exploit the declarative model content in the implementation of the collaborative mechanism. We present the appropriate Web-based collaborative prototype workspace developed as a MultiCAD Client. We also describe team profile estimation mechanisms able to update the proposed collaborative prototype response with respect to the current team's information needs. We investigate two different approaches. The first estimates the designers' profiles by considering each designer to be independent from each other. On the contrary, the second method exploits the dependencies of the designers involved in a design. As far as the first approach is concerned, a recursive algorithm is presented based on a neural network architecture. Regarding the second approach, we implement two different algorithms; a) the preference consensus scheme in which the degree of relevance for a solution is defined by the preferences of all the involved designers and b) a spectral clustering scheme in which designer classes are constructed from the designers preferences in a way that inter class information is minimized, while the intra class flow is maximized. Finally an example of use of the developed prototype system as well as its formal operation is presented. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.