Semantic Web-Based CRUD Operation and Constraint Validation for IFC-Based Information Management

Abstract

In the construction industry, the combination of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and semantic web technologies emerges as a promising approach for project information management. However, semantic web technologies are unfamiliar to construction industry practitioners, and there is an absence of useable tools to automate semantic web-based create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on Building Information Modeling (BIM) data. Moreover, the query results from some SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL)-based information retrieval methods typically cannot be postprocessed. To overcome these issues, this paper initially proposes a browser/server (B/S) architecture platform prototype to mitigate the operational complexity of the developed system. Subsequently, the core submodules of this platform prototype are developed via Apache Jena and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) APIs, thereby supporting automatic CRUD operations and result-analyzable SPARQL queries. Furthermore, by leveraging the developed CRUD systems, we propose a feasible method for implementing the soft-coded Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL)-based validation with variable thresholds, and subsequently develop an information compliance checking service for weld size. Eventually, the effectiveness of the developed CRUD system functions and the compliance checking service is validated by conducting case tests. In short, this study proposes a viable approach for the automatic execution of semantic web-based CRUD operations and constraint validation on Resource Description Framework (RDF)-represented information converted from the IFC model. This work contributes to the application of IFC and semantic web technologies within construction project management.