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Summary: Translation of Manufacturer's Product Data for the ARROW Product Search System
Leonard Newnham and Robert Amor
Building Research Establishment
Bucknalls Lane, Garston, Watford WD2 7JR, UK
Phone +44-1923-664549, Fax +44-1923-664689
E-mail {newnhaml, trebor }@bre.co.uk
1 Abstract
ARROW (Newnham et al. 1997 and 1998) is a UK initiative that can provide access to any
construction manufacturer's product information through virtual warehouses. This enables
designers and specifiers to correctly identify products that match the parameters of their
particular design. These warehouses rely on a system of indexing the manufacturer's product
databases at regular intervals to keep the warehouse data up to date. To do this efficiently the
manufacturers need to make their data available to the ARROW system in a standard format,
which will probably be very different to the format of the manufacturer's internal database.
For a manufacturer to participate in such a system there needs to be an easy and efficient
method of translating product data information between different database structures.
The data model used by ARROW is an extended IFC model (Amor et al. 1998), and as such
is a very complex structure when implemented with a relational database, (involving
approximately 200 tables). To be accepted by manufacturers, the translation mechanism must
take into account the following requirements. a) There is minimal re-entry of data. b) Once
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