Knowledge / AEC-native Data
Construction drawings
The 2D graphical record of design intent: plans, sections, elevations, details, schedules and title blocks, issued as sheets with revisions.
A drawing set is the most compact record of design intent a project has, and the hardest for software to read. Plans, sections, elevations, details and schedules carry meaning through symbols, references, revision clouds and title blocks, and the same element appears on several drawings at different scales. Teams navigate it by experience: knowing which drawing to open and which note matters. Structured knowledge turns the set into something a team can question directly, with every answer traceable to the drawing, the detail and the revision it came from.
What Teams Ask of the Data
Which drawings show this element, and do they agree with each other on size, level and location?
What is the current revision of each drawing, and what changed in the last issue?
Which details are referenced from this plan, and which references point to drawings that were never issued?
Where do the general notes or the legend override what the plan appears to show?
Which items on the schedule do not appear on any drawing, and which drawn items are missing from the schedule?
What does the drawing show that the specification does not cover?
Which drawings are affected by this RFI, this instruction or this variation?
What Generic AI Misses
A drawing is not text with pictures. Most of what it says is carried by geometry, symbols and the relationships between drawings: a section marker on a plan, a detail callout pointing to another drawing, a revision cloud around a change, a key that assigns meaning to a hatch. A general-purpose model reads the text it can find on the drawing and produces a summary that sounds like the drawing without having understood it. It will name a door number it found in a tag and miss the note beside it that says omitted.
The other failure is scale. A set has hundreds of drawings and the answer to most questions lives on three of them, read together. A model that treats each drawing as a separate file cannot follow a reference from plan to detail to schedule, so it answers from whichever drawing it happened to read. The output is plausible, specific and unverifiable, which is worse than no answer at all.
What Structured Knowledge Answers
QUESTION
Which drawings show the plant room door on level two, and do they agree on its size and fire rating?
ANSWER
The door appears on the level two general arrangement plan, the plant room enlarged plan and the door schedule. The general arrangement and the enlarged plan both show it as a double leaf door at the same location. The door schedule lists it as a single leaf FD30S doorset, while the fire strategy plan shows the plant room as a 60-minute enclosure. The schedule disagrees with both plans on the leaf configuration and with the fire strategy on the rating, and appears not to have been updated since the plant room was enlarged in the previous revision.
SOURCES
level two GA plan, drawing 2102 rev C03; plant room enlarged plan, drawing 2402 rev C02; door schedule, drawing 6001 rev C01, row D2.14; fire strategy plan, level two.
Illustrative. The project, documents and references are invented to show what an answer looks like.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
The Data in Context
Drawings answer to the specification, which states the requirements the drawings locate, and to the schedules, which list what the drawings show. The BIM model, where one exists, is the drawings' three-dimensional counterpart, and RFIs and variations are the record of what changed on them. Drawing coordination review and the specification-to-drawing consistency check both work across the set.
Related Knowledge
Construction specifications
The written performance and prescriptive requirements for materials, workmanship and systems, organised by work section (NBS, CSI MasterFormat, Uniclass).
Drawing schedules (doors, windows, finishes, equipment)
Tabular schedules on drawings or in the model listing elements, their references, properties and locations, and the links between them and the plans.
IFC and BIM models
The federated 3D information model and its IFC exchange format: objects, properties, classifications, relationships and geometry.
Drawing coordination review
Checking architectural, structural and MEP sheets against each other for conflicts, missing references and inconsistent schedules before issue.
Specification to drawing consistency check
Reconciling what the specification requires with what the drawings and schedules show, item by item, with every mismatch traced to its clause and sheet.
Does it read scanned or PDF drawings, or does it need CAD files?
What about revision clouds and revision notes?
Can it check the drawings against the model?