A rule-based semantic approach for automated regulatory compliance in the construction sector

Abstract

A key concern for professionals in any industry is ensuring regulatory compliance. Regulations are often complex and require in depth technical knowledge of the domain in which they operate. The level of technical detail and complexity in regulations is a barrier to their automation due to extensive software development time and costs that are involved. In this paper we present a rulebased semantic approach formulated as a methodology to overcome these issues by allowing domain experts to specify their own regulatory compliance systems without the need for extensive software development. Our methodology is based on the key idea that three semantic contexts are needed to fully understand the regulations being automated: the semantics of the target domain, the specific semantics of regulations being considered, and the semantics of the data format that is to be checked for compliance. This approach allows domain experts to create and maintain their own regulatory compliance systems, within a semantic domain that is familiar to them. At the same time, our approach allows for the often diverse nature of semantics within a particular domain by decoupling the specific semantics of regulations from the semantics of the domain itself. This paper demonstrates how our methodology has been validated using a series of regulations automated by professionals within the construction domain. The regulations that have been developed are then in turn validated on real building data stored in an industry specific format (the IFCs). The adoption of this methodology has greatly advanced the process of automating these complex sets of construction regulations, allowing the full automation of the regulation scheme within 18 months. We believe that these positive results show that, by adopting our methodology, the barriers to the building of regulatory compliance systems will be greatly lowered and the adoption of three semantic domains proposed by our methodology provides tangible benefits.

Ontology-based representation of IFC EXPRESS rules: An enhancement of the ifcOWL ontology

“…This is particularly useful during reasoning, because it reduces the risk of generating and using the fact inferred from a poorly built ontology. For examples, the works by Pauwels et al [17], Beach et al [19], and Lee et al [20] mentioned in Section 2 could benefit from the inclusion of the proposed class expressions that can increase the quality and confidence of inferences obtained via reasoning.…”

“…The use of rules was exemplified by the case of acoustic performance regulations. Similarly, Beach et al [19] developed a methodology to automatically check the compliance with regulations in the building industry. The authors suggest the development of specific regulation ontologies consisting of SWRL rules that can be linked with a core ontology representing the addressed industrial domain.…”

A framework for integrating syntax, semantics and pragmatics for computer-aided professional practice: With application of costing in construction industry

“…Although many of the key studies in this area note the importance of a semantic basis within the domain [33,34], it is understood that to provide a summary of all the necessary opinions a structure based on information is required, focusing on compatibility (syntax), a description of pricing analysis (semantics), and exact details of the circumstances surrounding the elements being assessed (pragmatics). Within the construction industry, this is particularly important as there is a growing trend towards reverse engineering of the semantics relating to the domain from the key information source, the IFCs [35]. There are however concerns regarding the suitability of this method, as IFCs have been produced for the purpose of storing information and therefore are not able to completely deliver the correct range of semantics required by construction management professionals.…”

Automation of Building Permission by Integration of BIM and Geospatial Data

“…Hjelseth and Nisbet [2] presented a method to mark-up regulations based on four operators, namely Requirement, Applies, Select, and Exception (RASE), as an initial step to facilitate the design of computer readable formats. Beach et al [3] utilised the RASE method to extract semantics from regulations and mapped these to semantics of the data format (BIM models) to enable a conversion into Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules. Lee et al [4] described a method to digitise building requirements in the Korean Building Act.…”