Archinect - News

Archinect's Lexicon: "Metadata"

2023-08-11T11:19:00-04:00

Archinect's Lexicon focuses on newly invented or adopted vocabulary within the architectural community. For this installment, we're featuring a term relevant to the both recent wave of generative AI tools released for public use in the AEC sector and beyond, and the software tools already underpinning the profession.

"Metadata," often described as "data about data," refers to information that provides details about other data. In essence, metadata offers context, description, or additional details about the main data it pertains to. Examples of metadata include the title of a document, the date a photo was taken, or the author of a piece of content.

In the context of building design, metadata plays several crucial roles:

Building Information Modeling (BIM): BIM is a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility. Within BIM, metadata can include information about the materials used, the manufacturer of a component, maintenance schedules, and much...

Harness Robocop social-networking ability with Highlight app

2013-12-12T15:31:00-05:00

The newest version of [Highlight], available for iPhone and Android, uses every sensor, signal, and stream it can get its hands on to passively figure out what you’re doing, and it intelligently scans users nearby to figure out who you might be interested in. It’s not necessarily about people you know but people you could know. And that makes it both way cooler and way creepier than Facebook could ever dream of being.

The Digital Future of Architectural History

2013-09-23T15:34:00-04:00

In creating associated descriptive metadata, in tagging building entries to describe their materials, types, and, perhaps most especially, their styles, the author of metadata is practicing the historian’s craft and engaging in the historian’s stock in trade. "Name it, then we’ll know what it is," Reyner Banham suggested at the end of “The Great Gizmo.” We can name it metadata creation, but we already know what it is: architectural history.

For several years Gabrielle Esperdy has been part of a team working on the development of SAH Archipedia — an online encyclopedia of American architecture sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians. Here she explores the critical challenge of creating structural and descriptive metadata for the new resource — and argues that the digital platform has the potential "not only to publish scholarship but to produce it."