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D4.3 Techniques for knowledge retrieval

Abstract

Health Care districts varying from academic hospitals to specific cure and/or care facilities (i.e. elderly homes, mother and child, heart or eye surgery), have all in common: They accommodate various activities, require complex logistics, and have different energy-demand due to varying activities and end-users. The design and construction of Health Care facilities is therefore an utmost complex task and represent a domain of many specialist and expertise work. In order to design an optimal health care building, the exchange of information and knowledge in the design process is evidently one of the most essential conditions for incorporating all relevant perspectives in the design models.

This Deliverable provides an overview of the current state of the art of the techniques that help to retrieve relevant information and knowledge from experts and users by the design team. The form and type of information can range from legislation, codes and directives, up to experience levels of various end-users (i.e. patients, staff, visitors, service providers such as caterers, maintenance operators etc.). Each of the techniques is elaborated by relevant partners who either use, develop or enhance the technique in STREAMER project. Based on this overview, the application and use of the techniques in relation to the STREAMER objectives will be discussed.

The essential questions that this Deliverable deal with are: How crucial information for design process can be gathered, how knowledge can be codified to be retrieved by design team members to be used throughout the design process.

Six techniques have been elaborated on their ability to retrieve knowledge from experiences or information sources elsewhere, and feed this into the design process. As examples, the automation of a traditional Programme of Requirements helping design team to validate and interpret the actual design layout of a hospital, or using prediction models that calculate the performance of the design layout against selected criteria (i.e. patient well-being, staff efficiency, and safety), or procurement methods in formalizing the collaboration act of design team are examples provided here. These techniques are discussed here to identify what sort of knowledge it deals with (which information is needed and from what source?), show their pre-conditions (i.e. what needs to be in place in order to make a workshop an effective tool to get the information on the table?), stakeholders (i.e. who is eventually working with the technique, what stakeholders are being involved etc.), strength and weaknesses are discussed.

In the end an analysis leads to strong recommendation that basically clears the road towards the next deliverable 4.4, where the next generation of knowledge management techniques will be discussed in the light of semantic driven participatory designing.

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