Sharing Linked Building Data in a Peer-to-Peer Network: ifcOWL Meets InterPlanetary File System

Abstract

The recent and significant change in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is the increasing use of building information management (BIM) tools in design and how the generated digital data are consumed. Although designers have primarily published blueprints and model files, multiple parties are now involved in producing different aspects of the data and may be consuming data produced by others. This evolution has created new challenges in sharing and synchronizing information across organizational boundaries. Linked building data is a community effort identified as a potential means of overcoming the barriers to data interoperability. In this paper, we present how the industry can be strengthened using a peer-to-peer network based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) framework to address the typical availability problems of web-based data. The paper particularly presents how Linked Data serialization of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard can be used in the context of IPFS and benchmarks the performance for the publication of models between IPFS versus HTTP protocol. We show that linked building data—in particular, IFC models converted into Resource Description Format (RDF) graphs according to the ifcOWL ontology—can be implemented using the framework, with initial indications of significant benefits of a peer-to-peer network in terms of performance, offline access, and immutable version history. Two use cases in distributed collaborative environments in the AEC/facility management (FM) sector using evolving multidomain models are used to evaluate the work. In a construction project, stakeholders must collaborate and share design data models for efficient and safe completion. Building information published using Linked Data techniques aims to facilitate data sharing between interested parties without a central intermediary. However, the challenges of Linked Data stem from using web protocols, resulting in limited availability, suboptimal performance, broken links, and lost history. This study explores using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a communication protocol for computers to communicate with each other directly without needing an intermediary. It addresses issues related to data availability on the web and data-transfer performance. The study demonstrates the suitability of IPFS in addressing the challenges of sharing building data. The data are available even when the original publisher host is down. In addition, the content-based addressing provides a digital fingerprint that can ensure authenticity and uniqueness, eliminating the data’s duplication. Therefore, it minimizes the storage space consumed by data backups and archives. However, because IPFS addresses and communication principles are incompatible with the Linked Data standard approach, we designed a way so that the construction data saved in IPFS can be accessed transparently as a part of the standard Linked Data network.