Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a promising technology for building informatics. Currently, an increasing number of applications adopt BIM to improve the building operations and facility management. In these applications, matching real-world facilities to the corresponding BIM items is a fundamental yet challenging task. This study addresses this issue using Natural Language Processing. Firstly, a novel BIM hierarchy tree (HiTree) is proposed to model the original spatial structure relationships of a BIM. Then, the locations of facilities are extracted from natural language through processes of word segmentation, keyword extraction, and semantic disambiguation. Thirdly, an algorithm that matches real-world facilities to the BIM data is developed using the HiTree and the extracted locations. Finally, a concrete case for a 35,000 m 2 library is presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution. BIM has become a common paradigm in the construction industry, and our scheme can facilitate more applications of BIM in building operations and facility management. One of the most representative applications is integrating the BIM data and information within IoT (Internet of Things) system intelligently by matching the BIM data to real-world facilities.INDEX TERMS Building information modeling (BIM), facility, natural language processing (NLP), facility management.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) captures numerous information the life cycle of buildings. Information retrieval is one of fundamental tasks for BIM decision support systems. Currently, most of the BIM retrieval systems focused on querying existing BIM models from a BIM database, seldom studies explore the multi-scale information retrieval from a BIM model. This study proposes a multi-scale information retrieval scheme for BIM jointly using the hierarchical structure of BIM and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Firstly, a BIM Hierarchy Tree (BIH-Tree) model is constructed to interpret the hierarchical structure relations among BIM data according to Industry Foundation Class (IFC) specification. Secondly, technologies of NLP and International Framework for Dictionaries (IFD) are employed to parse and unify the queries. Thirdly, a novel information retrieval scheme is developed to find the multi-scale information associated with the unified queries. Finally, the retrieval method proposed in this study is applied to an engineering case, and the practical results show that the proposed method is effective.