Towards preservation of semantically enriched architectural knowledge

Preservation of architectural knowledge faces substantial challenges, most notably due the high level of data heterogeneity. On the one hand, low-level architectural models include 3D models and point cloud data up to richer building information models (BIM), often residing in isolated data stores with insufficient support for ensuring consistency and managing change. On the other hand, the Web contains vast amounts of information of potential relevance for stakeholders in the architectural field, such as urban planners, architects or building operators. This includes in particular Linked Data, offering structured data about, for instance, energy-efficiency policies, geodata or traffic and environmental information but also valuable knowledge which can be extracted from social media, for instance, about peoples' movements in and around buildings or their perception of certain structures. In this paper we provide an over-view of our early work towards building a sustainable, semantic long-term archive in the architectural domain. In particular we highlight ongoing activities on semantic enrichment of low-level architectural models towards the curation of a semantic archive of architectural knowledge.