Students: Thomas Stocker, Dario Banfi, Jana Pejic, Thomas Kühner, Markus Dausch, Bishwa Hang Rai, Dominic Henze, Arno Schneider

The goal of “Dolphin” for “Grasshopper” is to support the early stages of the design process to find a source of inspiration, an explicit solution, or a means to more fully understand a design problem.  The “Dolphin” plugin allows the use of digital semantic building information in the parametric work environment of “Grasshopper” and “Rhinoceros” using the XML-based AGraphML exchange format developed by the “KSD research group”. The AGraphML format stores spatial and topological information that can be accessed through local sources and web-based sources. The information can either be downloaded in AgraphML files or accessed using a building information cloud directly that handles spatial information in a graph database, geometric information on a BIM Server and meta-information in a content management system. All databases of this information system are feely available (http://neo4j.com/ , http://bimserver.org/ , http://mediatum.sourceforge.net/).