Semantic Level Integration of Heterogeneous Building Models

One of the major aims in computer-aided engineering is to assist the planners in communication and collaboration during the building planning process. Since model-based planning is becoming widely accepted in the building industry, we assume that planners are working on partial models stored in distributed and heterogeneous model databases. A main goal of this project is to provide the engineers with an integrated view on these heterogeneous models. To realize this, two levels of integration have to be considered: the access level integration and the semantic level integration. In the presented project, the problem of access level integration is approached by software agents. However, in this context the core problem is the inconsistent semantics of the heterogeneous building model. Thus, this paper focuses on the semantic level integration. Based on an analysis of different types of heterogeneity a method for semantic integration of building model data in civil engineering is presented on the example of fire protection engineering. To provide fire protection engineers with an integrated transparent view, an ontology-based approach has been developed. The problems of distribution and heterogeneity are approached by different solution layers, following the principle of separation of concerns. By those means, the integration effort can be reduced effectively and resources can be integrated flexibly into network-based building project organizations.