Rich Information Structures

Technological advances enable and encourage practitioners and students to make the design process more information intensive. This information intensity raises questions of complexity: how to organize and intra-relate large amounts of information in order to facilitate efficient retrieval of this information. This involves issues of both modeling and visualizing this complexity in design presentations and project documentation facilities. We propose a methodology for constructing a rich information structure which offers new possibilities for accessing, viewing, and interpreting this information. Hereto, we present two techniques: a decomposition of documents by content, and the separation of syntax and semantics. We then discuss the effects of both techniques on issues of flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use in constructing a rich information structure. We finally describe an exemplary application we are developing that combines the proposed methodology and techniques for the purpose of presenting architectural analyses.