Enabling More Human-Oriented Exploration of Complex Building Information Models

Abstract

Building-related information is captured and has to be reused throughout the entire building life cycle. Therefore, an intuitively understandable and easy-to-handle access to a building life cycle wide archive is essential. Cross-disciplinary information seeking should be possible based on a three-dimensional representation of the building. In information seeking the planner must not be restricted to a single searching strategy. This paper initially focuses on all supporting explorative searching strategies. A “raw” building information model schema has been enhanced by user-oriented associations between particular data objects, referred to in this paper as “navigation links.” Each link is defined as a new property of a particular concept of the building model schema. Such a link points to a query recipe that can retrieve information about each instance of the concept. If the link is activated by a user, the query recipe is instantiated and processed by the system. The navigation links are formally represented using the Web Ontology Language. This paper describes the structure of the links as well as the structure of the system, which stores and processes the links throughout an information-seeking session.