Simulations as Part of the BIM Concept in Urban Management

Smart city management is part of the Smart Cities concept and can be an essential element for further development in this area. The BIM concept, based on a 3D model, data and for all the beneficial cooperation, expands exponentially in the civil engineering. However, the BIM concept is so broad and there are many possibilities in his area, that the development will take many years. One of these areas may be simulations that are not so widely used so far, but which can very well specify different situations and conditions. For these conditions, buildings or cities can be prepared in advance to prevent crises or unnecessary costs. The simulations and the results obtained from them can help us in the decision making phase. They predict problems or situations that can occur during the life cycle and thus prevent them from occurring. Based on the information we receive, we can objectively decide on the design solution, the material, the internal arrangement or, for example, the location of the building in the surrounding area

Ontology-based Classification and Analysis of non- emergency Smart-city Events

Several challenges are faced by citizens of urban centers while dealing with day-to-day events, and the absence of a centralised reporting mechanism makes event-reporting and redressal a daunting task. With the push on information technology to adapt to the needs of smart-cities and integrate urban civic services, the use of Open311 architecture presents an interesting solution. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses an existing Open311 ontology to classify and report non-emergency city-events, as well as to guide the citizen to the points of redressal. The use of linked open data and the semantic model serves to provide contextual meaning and make vast amounts of content hyper-connected and easily-searchable. Such a one-size-fits-all model also ensures reusability and effective visualisation and analysis of data across several cities. By integrating urban services across various civic bodies, the proposed approach provides a single endpoint to the citizen, which is imperative for smooth functioning of smart cities

Community College Online

In this report we find that the majority of Americans enrolling in higher education today do not match the mainstream image of recent high school graduates leaving home for the first time to settle into dorm life at a residential university campus. In 2012, only 12 percent of college students lived on campus. In fact, over four in ten college students in this country attend community colleges. In the fall of 2012, the public two-year sector enrolled 6.8 million undergraduates at over 1,000 institutions nationwide, more than any other higher education sector.This report indicates that often overlooked in conversations about college that tend to focus on elite, residential, four-year schools, community colleges occupy a critical space in higher education. Community college students not only make up a greater proportion of the college-going population than typically recognized, but they differ markedly in their demographic composition compared to the public four-year and private nonprofit sectors of higher education. Community college students are more likely to be older, commute to school, and care for dependents. They are also much more likely to attend part time and need remediation. In terms of racial and socioeconomic demographics, community college students are more diverse and lower-income than their four-year counterparts

Building Information Modeling (BIM) for existing buildings - literature review and future needs

Abstract not availableRebekka Volk, Julian Stengel, Frank Schultman

Building Information Modelling: Present realities and Future possibilities

BIM (Building Information Modelling), a term that is drawing the attention worldwide in the construction industry and governments, is a complex concept that involves management effort, tools and applications for enhancing information flow and therefore productivity for projects. This article pretends to briefly explain BIM, its advantages, challenges and potentialities while considering the current adoption of the concept in some countries. Furthermore, the article includes suggestions for the implementation of BIM in an organization as well as in projects and a list with some useful tools for this purpose

Biosensors for cardiac biomarkers detection: a review

The cardiovascular disease (CVD) is considered as a major threat to global health. Therefore, there is a growing demand for a range of portable, rapid and low cost biosensing devices for the detection of CVD. Biosensors can play an important role in the early diagnosis of CVD without having to rely on hospital visits where expensive and time-consuming laboratory tests are recommended. Over the last decade, many biosensors have been developed to detect a wide range of cardiac marker to reduce the costs for healthcare. One of the major challenges is to find a way of predicting the risk that an individual can suffer from CVD. There has been considerable interest in finding diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers that can be detected in blood and predict CVD risk. Of these, C-reactive protein (CRP) is the best known biomarker followed by cardiac troponin I or T (cTnI/T), myoglobin, lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A(2), interlukin-6 (IL-6), interlukin-1 (IL-1), low-density lipoprotein (LDL), myeloperoxidase (MPO) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) has been used to predict cardiovascular events. This review provides an overview of the available biosensor platforms for the detection of various CVD markers and considerations of future prospects for the technology are addressed

HBIM and Virtual Tools: A New Chance to Preserve Architectural Heritage

Nowadays, architectural heritage is increasingly exposed to dangers due to natural disasters or human invasive actions. However, management and conservation represent crucial phases within the life cycle of historical buildings. Unfortunately, the complexity of conservation practices and the lack of knowledge of historic buildings are the cause of an inefficient recovering process in case of emergencies. To overcome this problem, this research aims to ensure the preservation of relevant information through the use of building information modeling (BIM) methodology. By developing historic building information models (HBIMs), it is possible to enhance the architectural heritage. This represents an opportunity to incorporate digital media into the global heritage conservation field. To achieve this goal, a historical castle was selected as a case study; this unique piece of architecture is located in the Piedmont Region, close to city of Turin (Italy). The results show a direct relation between a historical digital model, finalized to the management of architectural and system components, and visualization tools. To conclude, the adoption of this strategy is an effective way to preserve and consult information using advanced visualization techniques based on augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR)

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

A Semantic Safety Check System for Emergency Management

There has been an exponential growth and availability of both structured and unstructured data that can be leveraged to provide better emergency management in case of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. This paper is an extension of a semantics-based web application for safety check, which uses of semantic web technologies to extract different kinds of relevant data about a natural disaster and alerts its users. The goal of this work is to design and develop a knowledge intensive application that identifies those people that may have been affected due to natural disasters or man-made disasters at any geographical location and notify them with safety instructions. This involves extraction of data from various sources for emergency alerts, weather alerts, and contacts data. The extracted data is integrated using a semantic data model and transformed into semantic data. Semantic reasoning is done through rules and queries. This system is built using front-end web development technologies and at the back-end using semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Apache Jena, TDB, and Apache Fuseki server. We present the details of the overall approach, process of data collection and transformation and the system built. This extended version includes a detailed discussion of the semantic reasoning module, research challenges in building this software system, related work in this area, and future research directions including the incorporation of geospatial components and standards