Extract

A rapid uptake of Building Information Modelling (BIM) by architects in recent years has enabled
improved collaboration and better information sharing among project stakeholders. BIM will continue to
have a positive impact on the quality improvement of the built environments and the overall productivity
boost in the industry. One activity that has not fully benefited from this collaborative approach is the
compliant design process whereby certain design aspects must be audited for compliance with some
normative standards or requirement specifications. A challenge to automate this laborious and errorprone
conventional manual process has been attributed to the inability of machines to readily process
legal knowledge that is conveyed in natural language texts. There have been a number of approaches
suggested by researchers towards enabling an automated compliant design process, each has its
advantages and also drawbacks. This paper introduces emerging open standards LegalDocML and
LegalRuleML for exchanging legal knowledge and describes an automated compliance audit framework
that treats both the building design data and the normative information as independent input
components to be processed. The framework incorporates a human guidance element to facilitate the
audit process. Lastly, a case study highlighting common compliant architectural design problems is used
to illustrate the approach.

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