BIM and GIS Integration and Interoperability Based on Semantic Web Technology

Abstract

When making design and construction decisions, planners must consider information from different scales and domains. Currently, building and geospatial data are shared and exchanged through a common data format, such as industry foundation classes (IFC). Because of the diversity and complexity of domain knowledge across building information modeling (BIM) and geographic information system (GIS) systems, however, these syntactic approaches are not capable of completely sharing semantic information that is unique in each system. This study uses semantic web technology to ensure semantic interoperability between existing BIM and GIS tools. The proposed approach is composed of three main steps: ontology construction, semantic integration through interoperable data formats and standards, and query of heterogeneous information sources. The completeness of the methodology is validated through a case study.