Building specifications as a domain-specific aspect language

In the construction industry an increasing number of buildings are designed using semantically rich three-dimensional models. In parallel, additional information is specified in a natural-language document called a building specification. 1 As not all details are present in the model these specifications have to be interpreted whenever costs are estimated or other analyses are performed. In this paper, we argue that building specifications contain cross-cutting concerns. We also argue that domain experts should be given the ability to formulate building specifications using a domain-specific aspect language so that the corresponding details can automatically be integrated into the model. The language needs to support a multitude of domain-specific abstractions that are absent in the building meta-model. Therefore we propose to allow the domain experts to extend the language iteratively by defining interpretation patterns [1]. Such a model enriching specification will improve tasks requiring detailed information and will allow for earlier or even concurrent development of the building specification along with the model. © 2012 ACM.