IfcOWL: A case of transforming EXPRESS schemas into ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies have been successfully applied as a semantic enabler of communication between both users and applications in fragmented, heterogeneous multinational business environments. In this paper we discuss the underlying principles, their current implementation status, and most importantly, their applicability to problems in the building information modeling domain. We introduce the development of an ontology for the building and construction sector based on the industry foundation classes. We discuss several approaches of lifting modeling information that is based on the express family of languages for data modeling onto a logically rigid and semantically enhanced ontological level encoded in the W3C Ontology Web Language. We exemplify the added value of such formal notation of building models by providing several examples where generic query and reasoning algorithms can be applied to problems that otherwise have to be manually hard-wired into applications for processing building information. Furthermore, we show how the underlying resource description framework and the set of technologies evolving around it can be tailored to the need of distributed collaborative work in the building and construction industry.

Is BIM Big Enough to Take Advantage of Big Data Analytics?

“…Logical approaches, that although could produce some benefits [10], normally cannot deal with the amount of data existent in real-world problems.…”

“…BIM models do not have complete semantics [10,27], but most of the data pieces are already classified in one or another class from the data schema.…”

“…Other efforts, that focus in interoperability of the data model, or the seamless ability to different software exchange information between one another, it must have to deal with the role and complexity in adding semantics inside BIM models [10,27]. This path of development follows in the direction of more analytics in BIM.…”

Ontology-Based Partial Building Information Model Extraction

“…The primary purpose of generating a partial model is to reduce the size and complexity of an IFC model, either to fit into the domain application requirement or the data transmission requirement (Beetz et al 2009, Weise et al 2003. Two kinds of partial model could be identified based on different scenarios.…”

“…The Model View Definition (MVD) initiative of buildingSMART is an exemple of work on such extraction (buildingSMART 2011). Beetz et al (2009) proposed a graph query method on the IFC ontology that compartmentalizes the ontology, which could filter out the geometry and topology information, leaving the rest for logic-based reasoning.…”