Building Ontology to Support Reasoning in Early Design

Current Building Information Models (BIM) are more complex than typically required for the early phase of the design process of a building. Reasoning with all the detailed components in a BIM intended for construction requires unnecessary effort. Therefore, this research developed a light-weight knowledge representation of a building for automatic reasoning about the conceptual design process. This research utilized an ontology to provide an underlying structure of objects and relationships of a building. The knowledge representation model developed was mapped to the IFCs (Industry Foundation Classes) data model for an open, global ISO standard that integrates information and data on construction projects and enables building information to be shared among the participants. A case study was conducted to develop a structured representation of an ontology where the relationships among the necessary components in the stage of preliminary design were to be automatically utilized to plan on the sizes of each room in a building and structured thoroughly with a simple structured representation.