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A Semantic Enrichment Engine for Building Information Modelling


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Authors

Belsky, M 

Abstract

Significant difficulties remain in exchanging information between building information modeling (BIM) tools. The industry foundation classes (IFC) exchange schema is too generic to capture the full semantic meaning needed for direct use by different construction project stakeholders’ BIM tools. Although BIM standards that prescribe model view definitions (MVD) for domain‐specific exchanges are under development, insufficient semantic definition of exchanges prevents achievement of the full potential of BIM through seamless interoperability. We propose an innovative approach for supplementing an IFC exchange file with semantically useful concepts inferred from the explicit and implicit information contained in the building model. A prototype software was implemented to test the applicability of the approach. It consists of a rule‐processing engine and allows composition of inference rule‐sets that can be tailored for different domains. The tests demonstrate semantic enrichment with precast concrete building models, adding inferred joint, slab aggregation and connection concepts

Description

Keywords

4005 Civil Engineering, 40 Engineering

Journal Title

Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1093-9687
1467-8667

Volume Title

31

Publisher

Wiley
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/I019308/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K000314/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/L010917/1)
European Commission (247586)
Technology Strategy Board (102058)
The authors are grateful to Prof. Chuck Eastman and his team at the Digital Building Laboratory at Georgia Tech for hosting the first author during the early stages of this work, and to the EU FP7 Marie Curie Grant for its financial support of this secondment.