Towards Systematic Understanding of Geometric Representations in BIM Standard: An Empirical Data-Driven Approach

The use of industry foundation classes (IFC) data can facilitate interoperability of building information modeling (BIM) among different applications to alleviate the problems of information missing and inconsistency. By virtue of its goodwill of transparency and openness, IFC data can be opened and viewed in any text editor. But it normally requires a significant amount of effort when manually interpreting IFC data, due to (1) its large number of entities; and (2) the complex connections between one entity and another. On the other hand, the explanations of IFC entities in the IFC schema specifications are difficult to understand or verify. To address such difficulties, in this paper, an empirical data-driven approach is proposed for achieving a systematic understanding of entity definitions in an IFC schema. The approach utilizes IFC data and schema in a synergistic way, to facilitate such systematic understanding. Experimental testing is used to serve as verifications of the understanding and accrue the understanding, along with which byproduct BIM tools will be developed. The proposed approach was tested on understanding entities for geometric representations in the IFC2X3_TC1 schema. Through the experimental testing, systematic understanding of 62 IFC entities were obtained, and a visualization algorithm was developed and implemented based on this understanding.