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Generating IFC models from heterogeneous data using semantic web

Ebrahim Karan (Department of Applied Engineering, Safety, and Technology, Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania, USA.)
Javier Irizarry (Department of Building Construction, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.)
John Haymaker (Schools of Architecture & Building Construction, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.)

Construction Innovation

ISSN: 1471-4175

Article publication date: 7 April 2015

616

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to develop a framework to represent semantic web query results as Industry Foundation Class (IFC) building models. The subject of interoperability has received considerable attention in the construction literature in recent years. Given the distributed, semantically heterogeneous data sources, the problem is to retrieve information accurately and with minimal human intervention by considering their semantic descriptions.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper provides a framework to translate semantic web query results into the XML representations of IFC schema and data. Using the concepts and relationships in an IFC schema, the authors first develop an ontology to specify an equivalent IFC entity in the query results. Then, a mapping structure is defined and used to translate and fill all query results into an ifcXML document. For query processing, the proposed framework implements a set of predefined query mappings between the source schema and a corresponding IFC output schema. The resulting ifcXML document is validated with an XML schema validating parser and then loaded into a building information modeling (BIM) authoring tool.

Findings

The research findings indicate that semantic web technology can be used, accurately and with minimal human intervention, to maintain semantic-level information when transforming information between web-based and BIM formats. The developed framework for representing IFC-compatible outputs allows BIM users to query and access building data at any time over the web from data providers.

Originality/value

Currently, the results of semantic web queries are not supported by BIM authoring tools. Thus, the proposed framework utilizes the capabilities of semantic web and query technologies to transform the query results to an XML representation of IFC data.

Keywords

Citation

Karan, E., Irizarry, J. and Haymaker, J. (2015), "Generating IFC models from heterogeneous data using semantic web", Construction Innovation, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 219-235. https://doi.org/10.1108/CI-05-2014-0030

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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