Ontology-Based Building Information Modeling

The World Wide Web has provided a vast distributed information space that is primarily designed for human consumption. The enmeshment of the Web and various business processes has made it imperative to define business information in a format that facilitates machine-to-machine exchange and automated processing. The construction industry is not an exception; construction business processes depend on a diverse set of information sources. For efficient processing of the construction business information, it is necessary to publish the information in a format that allows computer applications to easily discover, query and share the information. Currently, the standard for representing, accessing, and sharing a building model is the Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) data model. Several researchers have investigated the limitations of IFCs data model for interoperability among heterogeneous software applications. This paper presents the results of an on-going research on an ontology-based approach to building information modeling to facilitate information exchange among different knowledge domain applications. The approach developed in this study is based on a shared building ontology that models building domain element types and element relationships. The information systems to be integrated should be modeled using the shared ontology; each knowledge domain adds its own element properties to the shared building ontology. SWRL rules are used for mapping element properties from one domain to another. An example demonstrates how the developed approach can facilitate project information sharing between design and estimating domains.