Semantic Web Approach to Ease Regulation Compliance Checking in Construction Industry

Abstract

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area, covering products, components and project implementations. They also play an important role in ensuring the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. Control or conformance checking are becoming more complex every day, not only for industrials, but also for organizations charged with assessing the conformity of new products or processes. This paper will detail the approach taken by the CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment) in order to simplify this conformance control task. The approach and the proposed solutions are based on semantic web technologies. For this purpose, we first establish a domain-ontology, which defines the main concepts involved and the relationships, including one based on OWL (Web Ontology Language) [1]. We rely on SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) [2] and SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) [3] to reformulate the regulatory requirements written in natural language, respectively, in a controlled and formal language. We then structure our control process based on expert practices. Each elementary control step is defined as a SPARQL query and assembled into complex control processes "on demand", according to the component tested and its semantic

Applying PLU Rules on Different BIM/GIS Interoperability Approaches

“…Based on the semantic interoperability approaches we are going to present the existing possibility to connect IFC and CityGML on building scale. Also, we are going to adapt the approach presented in [29] to transform textual rules into semantic queries and enhance it in future work.…”

“…In [29], the authors present an approach and a tool to assist in compiling regulations and technical documents. For this purpose, a domain ontology, OntoDT, was introduced to represent concepts involved in the description of technical documents and regulations.…”

“…to find the most suitable one. In addition we are aiming to improve the approach presented in [29] which transform textual rules into semantic queries and finally connect PLU level with each multiscale model generated from the Interoperability approach.…”

RTS - an integrated analytic solution for managing regulation changes and their impact on business compliance

“…It is quite difficult and very time consuming for human beings to, given a specific product or requirement, manually locate all related provisions and obligations, from various laws and regulations, that could be applicable to the situation. Several researched approached the problem by proposing methods to formalize provisions inside text-based regulations in order to simplify regulation compliance checking [5,10]. While this has been done in some highly specific environment, most topics are regulated through the text based description of situation and regulations.…”

BimSPARQL: Domain-specific functional SPARQL extensions for querying RDF building data

“…Conformance constraints are interpreted and formalized as SPARQL queries in that paper. A similar method is developed in [9], which has introduced a semi-automatic process to transform regulatory texts to SPARQL queries. A limitation of both efforts is that they mainly focus on formalizing building regulations into a query language without specifying on how to map the used terminologies to building data models.…”