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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 14
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR CIVIL & STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and A.I. Khan
Paper XI.1

An Object Oriented Approach for Interpreting Architectural CAD Drawings

I. Ewen and M. Alshawi

Department of Surveying, University of Salford, Salford, England

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
I. Ewen, M. Alshawi, "An Object Oriented Approach for Interpreting Architectural CAD Drawings", in B.H.V. Topping, A.I. Khan, (Editors), "Information Technology for Civil & Structural Engineers", Civil-Comp Press, Edinburgh, UK, pp 167-174, 1993. doi:10.4203/ccp.14.11.1
Keywords: CAD, object-oriented, integration, computer integrated construction.

Abstract
The ability of CAD systems to respond intelligently to users is very limited, and although various attempts have been made to link CAD to other applications, the issues of analysing CAD drawings to distinguish between the various design components, and how to determine the topology of the spaces within the building, have not yet been fully addressed. Both these matters are at the very kernel of design and analysis activities, and this study proposes a method of encapsulating the knowledge of the building components, the spaces in the building, and the relationships that exist between them, in an object hierarchy stored permanently in the drawing database. Drawing primitives such as points, lines and arcs have been cross-referenced to the component objects to which they belong. This allows the CAD database to be viewed by system developers as linked sets of spaces, components and drawing primitives capable of being integrated intelligently with a wide variety of other applications.

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