A Semantics-Based Approach for Simplifying IFC Building Models to Facilitate the Use of BIM Models in GIS

Using solid building models, instead of the surface models in City Geography Markup Language (CityGML), can facilitate data integration between Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS). The use of solid models, however, introduces a problem of model simplification on the GIS side. The aim of this study is to solve this problem by developing a framework for generating simplified solid building models from BIM. In this framework, a set of Level of Details (LoDs) were first defined to suit solid building models—referred to as s-LoD, rang-ing from s-LoD1 to s-LoD4—and three unique problems in implementing s-LoDs were identified and solved by using a semantics-based approach, including identifying external objects for s-LoD2 and s-LoD3, distinguishing various slabs, and generating valid external walls for s-LoD2 and s-LoD3. The feasibility of the framework was validated by using BIM models, and the result shows that using semantics from BIM can make it easier to convert and simplify building models, which in turn makes BIM information more practical in GIS

An Assessment of Paths for Transforming IFC to Shapefile for Integration of BIM and GIS

© 2018 IEEE. Building Information Modelling (BIM) could provide detailed 3D building models to Geographic Information Systems (GISs) for the emerging studies in smart cities/digital cities. During information exchange, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) containing rich building information is the most used data format in BIM. However, GIS does not the capacity to directly consume the data in IFC due to data incompatibility between the two systems. Consequently, IFC files have to be transformed into a format that is accessible to GIS. Shapefile is one of them, given its popularity in geospatial science. This study tests the different formats and methods for transforming IFC to shapefile, assesses their performance, in order to offer a ranking, from which better decisions could be made when choosing an appropriate intermediate data format. The results show direct transformation from IFC to shapefile retained the most geometry and semantic information. If the direct transformation method does not work in some cases, 3DS, VRML, or SKP could be used as alternatives to retain most of the information, while DWG, DXF, KML, and KMZ should not be considered due to their poor performance in the test

Integration of Building Information Modelling and Geographic Information System at Data Level Using Semantics and Geometry Conversion Approach Towards Smart Infrastructure Management

This study integrates Building Information Modelling (BIM)and Geographic Information System (GIS) at data level using an open source approach for geometry transformation and an automatic attribute searching algorithm for semantics transfer for the purpose of facilitating data transformation from BIM to GIS. Based on that, an infrastructure management system has been developed using Web GIS technology in conjunction with the models created by BIM and transformed into GIS using the proposed approach