Student: Dario Banfi

Touchtect 2.0 is a NUI (Natural User Interface) application for a graphic research of architectural reference objects to support early design processes. Through the sketching of rooms and their connections between each other (e.g. connected through a door or a wall) reference objects with similar components will be retrieved from the server. Furthermore the application provides the opportunity to connect the graphic search with attributes such as location, architect or year of construction.

The search results provide information, photographs and floor plans as well as the room graph and the 3d model. Therefor the application accesses a central web service, the Unified Query Service, which queries additional web services.

Student: David Frey

The Unified Query Service is a solution to the common problem of front-end applications separately requesting information from individual web services. The more query systems accessed the more difficult it gets to adapt the query to the individual cases in order to assure a user-friendly interface. Another important part is the advancement of the search engines themselves. Rather than different applications having to determine what information needs to be sent to which kind of service one can simply access the Unified Query Service. The existing infrastructure is now accessible in an integrated single web service that is able to reply to complex queries and gives ranked search result.