Investigating the State of Play of Geobim Across Europe

In both the Geographic Information (Geo) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) domains, it is widely acknowledged that the integration of data from both domains is beneficial and a crucial step in facing the multi-disciplinary challenges of our built environment. The result of this integration – which can broadly be termed GeoBIM – could answer questions such as identifying an appropriate Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning system for a building based on room usage, outside air temperature, solar exposure and traffic pollution or validating whether a proposed built asset meets relevant planning constraints. Developing a coherent approach to GeoBIM integration requires consensus between multiple stakeholders from both the Geo and the BIM side and at an international level. This multi-country and multi-stakeholder approach is the topic of a 2-year EuroSDR project on GeoBIM integration that started in November 2017. The general aim of the project is to detail both the needs and the issues of GeoBIM integration, studied from use cases as well as from existing experiences in the participating countries and to develop initial solutions accordingly. This paper reports initial results – it identifies strong potential for GeoBIM but also rather fragmented activity, with no national level focus. It also notes that research (both in industry and academia) primarily focuses on standards, interoperability and data integration or exchange. Based on these findings – and with a focus on existing work and topics of interest to NMCAs – the next phase of the work will develop more detailed case studies for Asset Management and Urban Planning

CityGML in the Integration of BIM and the GIS: Challenges and Opportunities

CityGML (City Geography Markup Language) is the most investigated standard in the integration of building information modeling (BIM) and the geographic information system (GIS), and it is essential for digital twin and smart city applications. The new CityGML 3.0 has been released for a while, but it is still not clear whether its new features bring new challenges or opportunities to this research topic. Therefore, the aim of this study is to understand the state of the art of CityGML in BIM/GIS integration and to investigate the potential influence of CityGML3.0 on BIM/GIS integration. To achieve this aim, this study used a systematic literature review approach. In total, 136 papers from Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus were collected, reviewed, and analyzed. The main findings of this review are as follows: (1) There are several challenging problems in the IFC-to-CityGML conversion, including LoD (Level of Detail) mapping, solid-to-surface conversion, and semantic mapping. (2) The ‘space’ concept and the new LoD concept in CityGML 3.0 can bring new opportunities to LoD mapping and solid-to-surface conversion. (3) The Versioning module and the Dynamizer module can add dynamic semantics to the CityGML. (4) Graph techniques and scan-to-BIM offer new perspectives for facilitating the use of CityG

Opportunities and challenges for GeoBIM in Europe: developing a building permits use-case to raise awareness and examine technical interoperability challenges

The integration of geoinformation with BIM (GeoBIM) is critical to underpin solutions to many city-related challenges. However, to achieve an effective integration it is necessary to consider not only data and technical options but also current practice and users’ needs. This paper describes work carried out within the EuroSDR-GeoBIM project to address this challenge. After investigating potential uses for GeoBIM and existing challenges, we address a planning permits for buildings use case, to help bridging the gap between theory and practice. The resultshighlights a high-level harmonised workflow envisaging the use of GeoBIM information for automating the planning permits process

Development of a Conceptual Mapping Standard to Link Building and Geospatial Information

This study introduces the BIM (building information modeling)-GIS (geographic information system) conceptual mapping (B2GM) standard ISO N19166 and proposes a mapping mechanism. In addition, the major issues concerning BIM-GIS integration, and the considerations that it requires, are discussed. The B2GM is currently being standardized by the spatial-information international standardization organization TC211. Previous studies on BIM-GIS integration seem to focus on the integration of different types of model schemas and on the implementation of service interfaces. B2GM concerns the clear definition of the conditions and methods for mapping the object information required from the user’s use-case viewpoint for city-scale mapping. The benefits of the B2GM approach are that the user is able directly control the BIM-GIS linkage and integration process in order to acquire the necessary objection information. This can reveal cases of possibly unclear BIM-GIS integration outside the black box in an explicit and standard way, so that the user can distinctively predict the final output obtainable from the BIM-GIS integration. This study examined B2GM in terms of its development background, components, and several utilization examples, as well as the levels and considerations of the integration of different BIM-GIS models