Abstract
Although integration has been a research subject for decades, nowadays we still see problem statements related to integration, which are also very similar to those discussed in articles dated a long time ago. One of the major differences between now and then perhaps is our collective experience in resolving the integration problem by using common semantic models, which is still a mainstream strategy and has resulted in many different types of industry standards. This strategy offers stability and data transparency, but requires tremendous front-loaded effort to establish agreements in terms of data semantics among various software vendors, which is proved to be very difficult to achieve. Besides, the fact that today people are still facing and seeking solutions to the same problem as researchers did decades ago, to some degree, indicated the limitation of this strategy. In this paper, in addition to the review of major integration approaches, the author discusses a hybrid integration strategy, which may potentially provide many benefits for applications such as those supporting dynamic or ad-hoc collaboration among business partners. This type of collaboration happens often in many areas of the AEC industry, such as large-scale capital projects.