ICA3D – Intelligent computer-aided ancient Chinese architecture design

Ancient Chinese architecture represents a unique contribution to the world’s architectural heritage. However, there has been a serious lack of computer supported tools for representing, modeling and designing different forms of ancient Chinese buildings. We present ICA3D, an intelligent computer-aided system for designing ancient Chinese-style architecture. With ICA3D, the user has multiple choices of interaction from interactive menus to Chinese natural language description. The Semantic Web technologies are used to represent the domain knowledge including complex rules for composing complete timber structures from individual pieces of wood and rules for inferring construction sequences. Compared with other CAD technologies, the approaches presented in this paper feature a combination of user interaction and automation, a text-to-scene pipeline, and a scalable knowledge infrastructure supported by automated reasoning.