1997 Annual Meeting

1997 CIB W78 Annual Meeting
Friday July 11
Cairns, Australia

Minutes of 1996 Meeting

These had been previously accepted as a true record having been circulated to members by e-mail and posted on the W78 web site.

Actions arising

These were all covered elsewhere on the agenda.

The Work Programme

• Use of Internet
  A verbal report on this work was made by Ziga Turk, Bo-Christer Bjork and Per Christiansen. On the electronic journal, progress in publishing 5 papers was reported. A further 5 papers were currently being refereed. In discussion the issue of the journals academic acceptance was noted. Suggestions were made regarding making the existence of the journal better known in the IAI and Construct IT communities. The possibility of the journals papers extending to non-refereed practical papers was also raised. All W78 members were encouraged to look to the journal as a vehicle for publication and to project its existence to their own network of contacts to promote its visibility. More generally, the commission's list server, web pages, database and other services were discussed. Control over access to the list server would be subject to editorial control following recent unwelcome incursions. Members of W78 were encouraged to make their own web activities link with those of W78 under their own individual or collaborative funded projects.

• Virtual Building Model
  A colleague of Matti Hannus reported that some progress was being made with this in VTT. IAI were also progressing such a development as a test bed for IFC development. It was agreed that as soon as progress was made with such a model from either VTT or IAI, this would be brought to the attention of W78 members through the list server and web links.

• National IT Strategies
  Little progress had been made with this project in the past 12 months. It was reported that the SCENIC project which was addressing this task, would be reporting within the next 6 months and that this would be used as a basis for extending the work to other countries where efforts were known to be being made including in Australia and Singapore.

• A new proposal was made for an activity to address one of the conference's workshops on a review of process modeling activities. Work would continue in collecting information on process modeling methods and tools to support them. Making such information available on a web site as part of the W78 web activity would be explored.

Future Meetings

• 1998
  a detailed proposal was made by Bo-Christer Bjork for the next meeting to be in Stockholm. This would take place on June 3-5 to coincide with the CIB World Congress on June 7-12. The theme of the next workshop would be the Construction IT innovation cycle embracing: research, standards, software development and best practice implementation. Participation in the meeting would be particularly encouraged from prominent members of major EU projects, from standardisation groups, and from national Construction IT Centres including those forming part of the Armathwaite Initiative.

  The format would be:

  • Day 1 - leading research projects
  • Day 2 - standardisation and software development
  • Day 3 - Best Practice Case Studies

  An international organising committee would be assembled to particularly assist in identifying people for invited presentations. An open element would also be included in the programme for W78 members in general.

• 1999
  a proposal was made for this to be held in Vancouver. This might be a W78 specific event that might include involvement of Thomas Froese from UBC and Martin Fischer of Stanford. In addition it might allow involvement of W78 in the 8th International Conference on the Durability of Building Materials that might include involvement of W80, W94, TG22, W60, W57, TG11 and TG16. Involvement of W78 with this event possibly combined with a separate W78-only activity would be taken forward by Dana Vanier in consultation with Thomas Froese and Martin Fischer.

• 2000
  a proposal was made for this event to be hosted by the Icelandic Building Research Centre in Iceland. This proposal would be further developed at the next meeting in Stockholm.

  Other offers for hosting future W78 meetings had been received from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and from the Construct IT Centre in Hong Kong. These would be considered as possible future venues for a W78 meeting after the year 2000. Georgia Tech would be considered as a venue in the unlikely event that Vancouver proved unsuitable for 1999.

Links to Other Working Commissions

The suggestion was made that W78 should establish a closer working relationship with the IAI and with the Armathwaite Initiative of collaboration between major national research centres. The opportunity for W78 members to become part of the Object Technology network being formed by the UK government was also raised

Any Other Business

The Coordinator thanked Robin Drogemuller for having hosted the meeting, the Board for their support during the year and all for attending.


Martin Betts July 11th 1997.