“Computational Civil Engineering - "Intersections" International Journal

44 F.-Zs. Gobesz, D. Turdacompanies advertising through web pages, offering services, materials,technologies, even publishing product catalogues, is growing every day. Moreover,consumers are searching for information over the Internet, using so-called“portals”, commercial intermediaries that bring suppliers together and provideimproved access to supplier information.Though institutions and organizations that may provide lists of web addresses ofsuppliers and portals often support professionals in AEC, it is still quite difficult tofind what is needed. From international point of view, significant differences indata structures, classifications, specifically industrial fragmentation (sometimesdue to national characteristics and social traditions) are making hard to find andsell construction products and services over the national borders. Although therewere some international (also European) initiatives addressing this issue, there isstill need for a viable solution.2. INFORMATION THROUGH THE WEBOne of the most impressive European initiatives was the development of XMLapplications for building and construction. XML (eXtended Mark-up Language) isvery suitable to structure data, to create and handle taxonomies. Data processing,browsing, viewing can be done in many ways, almost independently from thesource files, in accordance to the needs.Figure 1. XML content visualization as HTML, 2D-SVG, 3D-VRM.