Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents

Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

International audienceRegulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents

An Ontology for Modelling and Supporting the Process of Authoring Technical Assessments

International audienceIn this paper, we present a semantic web approach for modelling the process of creating new technical and regulatory documents related to the Building sector. This industry, among other industries, is currently experiencing a phenomenal growth in its technical and regulatory texts. Therefore, it is urgent and crucial to improve the process of creating regulations by automating it as much as possible. We focus on the creation of particular technical documents issued by the French Scientific and Technical Centre for Building (CSTB), called Technical Assessments, and we propose services based on Semantic Web models and techniques for modelling the process of their creation

Modélisation de documents réglementaires dans le domaine du bâtiment

International audienceThis paper gives an overview of a formal semantics-based approach to support the process of modeling new regulations. We focus on technical advices based on technical guides issued by the French Scientific and Technical Centre for Building (CSTB) capturing both regulations and expert knowledge of CSTB experts on how using regulations when producing a technical advice. The knowledge contained in guides is represented into SBVR rules, based on a controlled vocabulary derived from an OWL domain ontology and these rules are implemented into SPARQL queries. The know-how knowledge of CSTB experts is viewed as workflows of SPARQL queries and declaratively represented into RDF annotations. These workflows of queries are executed to assist the expert when producing technical advices by automating the compliance checking of technical documents to regulations

Aide à la création et à l'exploitation de réglementations basée sur les modèles et techniques du Web sémantique

Regulations in the Building industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. For more than 30 years, CSTB has proved its expertise in this field through the development of the complete encyclopedia of French technical and regulatory texts in the building domain: the REEF. In the framework of collaboration between CSTB and the I3S laboratory, we are carrying on research on the acquisition of knowledge from the technical and regulatory information contained in the REEF and the automated processing of this knowledge with the final goal of assisting professionals in the use of these texts and the creation of new texts. We are implementing this work in CSTB to help industrials in the writing of Technical Assessments. The problem is how to specify these assessments and standardize their structure using models and adaptive semantic services. The research communities of Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web play a key role in providing the models and techniques relevant for our research, whose main objective is to simplify access to technical regulatory information, to support professionals in its implementation, and to facilitate the writing of new regulations while taking into account constraints expressed in the existing regulatory corpus. We focus on Technical Assessments based on technical guides capturing both regulations and knowledge of CSTB experts when producing these documents. A Technical Assessment (in French: Avis Technique or ATec) is a document containing technical information on the usability of a product, material, component or element of construction, which has an innovative character. We chose this Technical Assessment as a case study because CSTB has the mastership and a wide experience in these kinds of technical documents. We are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides used to validate the Assessment. These Guides are regulatory complements offered by CSTB to the various industrials to enable easier reading of technical regulations. They collect execution details with a wide range of possible situations of implementations. Our work aims to formalize the Technical Guides in a machine-processable model to assist the creation of Technical Assessments by automating their validation. For this purpose, we first constructed a domain-ontology, which defines the main concepts involved in the Technical Guides. This ontology called “OntoDT” is coupled with domain thesauri. Several are being developed at CSTB among which one seems the most relevant by its volume and its semantic approach: the thesaurus from the REEF project. Our second contribution is the use of standard SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) and SPARQL to reformulate the regulatory requirements of guides both in a controlled and formal language Third, our model incorporates expert knowledge on the verification process of Technical Documents. We have organized the SPARQL queries representing regulatory constraints into several processes. Each component involved in the Technical Document corresponds to a elementary process of compliance checking. An elementary process contains a set of SPARQL queries to check the compliance of an elementary component. A full complex process for checking a Technical Document is defined recursively and automatically built as a set of elementary processes relative to the components which have their semantic definition in OntoDT. Finally, we represent in RDF the association between the SBVR rules and SPARQL queries representing the same regulatory constraints. We use annotations to produce a compliance report in natural language to assist users in the writing of Technical Assessments.Les réglementations concernant l’industrie de la construction deviennent de plus en plus complexes et touchent plus d’un domaine à la fois. Elles portent sur les produits, les composants et l'exécution des projets. Elles jouent aussi un rôle important pour garantir la qualité d'un bâtiment, ses caractéristiques et minimiser son impact environnemental. Depuis 30 ans, le CSTB prouve son savoir-faire en la matière au travers du développement du REEF, l’encyclopédie complète des textes techniques et réglementaires de la construction. Dans le cadre d’une collaboration entre le CSTB et le laboratoire I3S, nous avons travaillé à la formalisation et au traitement automatisé des informations technico-réglementaires contenues dans le REEF. Nous avons mis en œuvre notre approche pour aider à la création de nouveaux Avis Techniques. Il s'agit de préciser comment ils sont rédigés et comment standardiser leur structure grâce à la mise en œuvre de services sémantiques adaptés. Nous avons réussi à identifier et à comprendre les problèmes liés à la rédaction d'avis techniques et nous nous sommes focalisés sur le renseignement des dossiers techniques par les industriels. Nos contributions sont les suivantes : Nous avons construit manuellement une ontologie du domaine, qui définit les principaux concepts impliqués dans l’élaboration des Avis Technique. Cette ontologie appelée "OntoDT" est couplée avec le thésaurus du projet REEF. Nous l’avons définie à partir de l’étude des dossiers techniques existants, du thesaurus REEF et en interviewant les instructeurs du CSTB. Nous utilisons conjointement les standards SBVR et SPARQL pour reformuler, à la fois dans un langage contrôlé et dans un langage formel, les contraintes réglementaires présentes dans les Guides pratiques. SBVR représente une assurance de la qualité du texte des contraintes réglementaires présentées à l’utilisateur et SPARQL permet l’automatisation de la vérification de ces contraintes. Ces deux représentations reposent sur l’ontologie de domaine que nous avons développée. Nous intégrons des connaissances expertes sur le processus même de vérification des dossiers techniques. Nous avons organisé en différents processus les requêtes SPARQL représentant des contraintes réglementaires. A chaque composant intervenant dans un dossier technique correspond un processus de vérification de sa conformité à la réglementation en vigueur. Les processus sont représentés de manière déclarative en RDF et un moteur de processus interprète ces descriptions RDF pour ordonner et déclencher l’exécution des requêtes nécessaires à la vérification d’un dossier technique particulier. Enfin, nous représentons de façon déclarative en RDF l’association des représentations SBVR et SPARQL des réglementations et nous utilisons ces annotations pour produire à l’utilisateur un rapport de conformité en langue naturelle pour l’assister dans la rédaction d’un avis technique

Semantic web models to support the creation of technical regulatory documents in building industry

Les réglementations concernant l’industrie de la construction deviennent de plus en plus complexes et touchent plus d’un domaine à la fois. Elles portent sur les produits, les composants et l'exécution des projets. Elles jouent aussi un rôle important pour garantir la qualité d'un bâtiment, ses caractéristiques et minimiser son impact environnemental. Depuis 30 ans, le CSTB prouve son savoir-faire en la matière au travers du développement du REEF, l’encyclopédie complète des textes techniques et réglementaires de la construction. Dans le cadre d’une collaboration entre le CSTB et le laboratoire I3S, nous avons travaillé à la formalisation et au traitement automatisé des informations technico-réglementaires contenues dans le REEF. Nous avons mis en œuvre notre approche pour aider à la création de nouveaux Avis Techniques. Il s'agit de préciser comment ils sont rédigés et comment standardiser leur structure grâce à la mise en œuvre de services sémantiques adaptés. Nous avons réussi à identifier et à comprendre les problèmes liés à la rédaction d'avis techniques et nous nous sommes focalisés sur le renseignement des dossiers techniques par les industriels. Nos contributions sont les suivantes : Nous avons construit manuellement une ontologie du domaine, qui définit les principaux concepts impliqués dans l’élaboration des Avis Technique. Cette ontologie appelée "OntoDT" est couplée avec le thésaurus du projet REEF. Nous l’avons définie à partir de l’étude des dossiers techniques existants, du thesaurus REEF et en interviewant les instructeurs du CSTB. Nous utilisons conjointement les standards SBVR et SPARQL pour reformuler, à la fois dans un langage contrôlé et dans un langage formel, les contraintes réglementaires présentes dans les Guides pratiques. SBVR représente une assurance de la qualité du texte des contraintes réglementaires présentées à l’utilisateur et SPARQL permet l’automatisation de la vérification de ces contraintes. Ces deux représentations reposent sur l’ontologie de domaine que nous avons développée. Nous intégrons des connaissances expertes sur le processus même de vérification des dossiers techniques. Nous avons organisé en différents processus les requêtes SPARQL représentant des contraintes réglementaires. A chaque composant intervenant dans un dossier technique correspond un processus de vérification de sa conformité à la réglementation en vigueur. Les processus sont représentés de manière déclarative en RDF et un moteur de processus interprète ces descriptions RDF pour ordonner et déclencher l’exécution des requêtes nécessaires à la vérification d’un dossier technique particulier. Enfin, nous représentons de façon déclarative en RDF l’association des représentations SBVR et SPARQL des réglementations et nous utilisons ces annotations pour produire à l’utilisateur un rapport de conformité en langue naturelle pour l’assister dans la rédaction d’un avis technique.Regulations in the Building industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. For more than 30 years, CSTB has proved its expertise in this field through the development of the complete encyclopedia of French technical and regulatory texts in the building domain: the REEF. In the framework of collaboration between CSTB and the I3S laboratory, we are carrying on research on the acquisition of knowledge from the technical and regulatory information contained in the REEF and the automated processing of this knowledge with the final goal of assisting professionals in the use of these texts and the creation of new texts. We are implementing this work in CSTB to help industrials in the writing of Technical Assessments. The problem is how to specify these assessments and standardize their structure using models and adaptive semantic services. The research communities of Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web play a key role in providing the models and techniques relevant for our research, whose main objective is to simplify access to technical regulatory information, to support professionals in its implementation, and to facilitate the writing of new regulations while taking into account constraints expressed in the existing regulatory corpus. We focus on Technical Assessments based on technical guides capturing both regulations and knowledge of CSTB experts when producing these documents. A Technical Assessment (in French: Avis Technique or ATec) is a document containing technical information on the usability of a product, material, component or element of construction, which has an innovative character. We chose this Technical Assessment as a case study because CSTB has the mastership and a wide experience in these kinds of technical documents. We are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides used to validate the Assessment. These Guides are regulatory complements offered by CSTB to the various industrials to enable easier reading of technical regulations. They collect execution details with a wide range of possible situations of implementations. Our work aims to formalize the Technical Guides in a machine-processable model to assist the creation of Technical Assessments by automating their validation. For this purpose, we first constructed a domain-ontology, which defines the main concepts involved in the Technical Guides. This ontology called “OntoDT” is coupled with domain thesauri. Several are being developed at CSTB among which one seems the most relevant by its volume and its semantic approach: the thesaurus from the REEF project. Our second contribution is the use of standard SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) and SPARQL to reformulate the regulatory requirements of guides both in a controlled and formal language Third, our model incorporates expert knowledge on the verification process of Technical Documents. We have organized the SPARQL queries representing regulatory constraints into several processes. Each component involved in the Technical Document corresponds to a elementary process of compliance checking. An elementary process contains a set of SPARQL queries to check the compliance of an elementary component. A full complex process for checking a Technical Document is defined recursively and automatically built as a set of elementary processes relative to the components which have their semantic definition in OntoDT. Finally, we represent in RDF the association between the SBVR rules and SPARQL queries representing the same regulatory constraints. We use annotations to produce a compliance report in natural language to assist users in the writing of Technical Assessments

Aide à la création et à l'exploitation de réglementations basée sur les modèles et techniques du Web sémantique

Les réglementations concernant l industrie de la construction deviennent de plus en plus complexes et touchent plus d un domaine à la fois. Elles portent sur les produits, les composants et l'exécution des projets. Elles jouent aussi un rôle important pour garantir la qualité d'un bâtiment, ses caractéristiques et minimiser son impact environnemental. Depuis 30 ans, le CSTB prouve son savoir-faire en la matière au travers du développement du REEF, l encyclopédie complète des textes techniques et réglementaires de la construction. Dans le cadre d une collaboration entre le CSTB et le laboratoire I3S, nous avons travaillé à la formalisation et au traitement automatisé des informations technico-réglementaires contenues dans le REEF. Nous avons mis en œuvre notre approche pour aider à la création de nouveaux Avis Techniques. Il s'agit de préciser comment ils sont rédigés et comment standardiser leur structure grâce à la mise en œuvre de services sémantiques adaptés. Nous avons réussi à identifier et à comprendre les problèmes liés à la rédaction d'avis techniques et nous nous sommes focalisés sur le renseignement des dossiers techniques par les industriels. Nos contributions sont les suivantes : Nous avons construit manuellement une ontologie du domaine, qui définit les principaux concepts impliqués dans l élaboration des Avis Technique. Cette ontologie appelée "OntoDT" est couplée avec le thésaurus du projet REEF. Nous l avons définie à partir de l étude des dossiers techniques existants, du thesaurus REEF et en interviewant les instructeurs du CSTB. Nous utilisons conjointement les standards SBVR et SPARQL pour reformuler, à la fois dans un langage contrôlé et dans un langage formel, les contraintes réglementaires présentes dans les Guides pratiques. SBVR représente une assurance de la qualité du texte des contraintes réglementaires présentées à l utilisateur et SPARQL permet l automatisation de la vérification de ces contraintes. Ces deux représentations reposent sur l ontologie de domaine que nous avons développée. Nous intégrons des connaissances expertes sur le processus même de vérification des dossiers techniques. Nous avons organisé en différents processus les requêtes SPARQL représentant des contraintes réglementaires. A chaque composant intervenant dans un dossier technique correspond un processus de vérification de sa conformité à la réglementation en vigueur. Les processus sont représentés de manière déclarative en RDF et un moteur de processus interprète ces descriptions RDF pour ordonner et déclencher l exécution des requêtes nécessaires à la vérification d un dossier technique particulier. Enfin, nous représentons de façon déclarative en RDF l association des représentations SBVR et SPARQL des réglementations et nous utilisons ces annotations pour produire à l utilisateur un rapport de conformité en langue naturelle pour l assister dans la rédaction d un avis technique.Regulations in the Building industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. For more than 30 years, CSTB has proved its expertise in this field through the development of the complete encyclopedia of French technical and regulatory texts in the building domain: the REEF. In the framework of collaboration between CSTB and the I3S laboratory, we are carrying on research on the acquisition of knowledge from the technical and regulatory information contained in the REEF and the automated processing of this knowledge with the final goal of assisting professionals in the use of these texts and the creation of new texts. We are implementing this work in CSTB to help industrials in the writing of Technical Assessments. The problem is how to specify these assessments and standardize their structure using models and adaptive semantic services. The research communities of Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web play a key role in providing the models and techniques relevant for our research, whose main objective is to simplify access to technical regulatory information, to support professionals in its implementation, and to facilitate the writing of new regulations while taking into account constraints expressed in the existing regulatory corpus. We focus on Technical Assessments based on technical guides capturing both regulations and knowledge of CSTB experts when producing these documents. A Technical Assessment (in French: Avis Technique or ATec) is a document containing technical information on the usability of a product, material, component or element of construction, which has an innovative character. We chose this Technical Assessment as a case study because CSTB has the mastership and a wide experience in these kinds of technical documents. We are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides used to validate the Assessment. These Guides are regulatory complements offered by CSTB to the various industrials to enable easier reading of technical regulations. They collect execution details with a wide range of possible situations of implementations. Our work aims to formalize the Technical Guides in a machine-processable model to assist the creation of Technical Assessments by automating their validation. For this purpose, we first constructed a domain-ontology, which defines the main concepts involved in the Technical Guides. This ontology called OntoDT is coupled with domain thesauri. Several are being developed at CSTB among which one seems the most relevant by its volume and its semantic approach: the thesaurus from the REEF project. Our second contribution is the use of standard SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) and SPARQL to reformulate the regulatory requirements of guides both in a controlled and formal language Third, our model incorporates expert knowledge on the verification process of Technical Documents. We have organized the SPARQL queries representing regulatory constraints into several processes. Each component involved in the Technical Document corresponds to a elementary process of compliance checking. An elementary process contains a set of SPARQL queries to check the compliance of an elementary component. A full complex process for checking a Technical Document is defined recursively and automatically built as a set of elementary processes relative to the components which have their semantic definition in OntoDT. Finally, we represent in RDF the association between the SBVR rules and SPARQL queries representing the same regulatory constraints. We use annotations to produce a compliance report in natural language to assist users in the writing of Technical Assessments.NICE-Bibliotheque electronique (060889901) / SudocSudocFranceF

Author manuscript, published in "The Fifth International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2011 (2011)" An ontological approach for modeling technical standards for compliance checking

Abstract. This paper gives an overview of a formal semantic-based approach of modeling some regulations in the photovoltaic field to help the delivering of technical assessments at the French scientific center on Building Industry (CSTB). Starting from regulatory texts, we first explicit SBVR rules and then formalize them into ontology-based rules in the SPARQL language. These are exploited in the modeling of the compliance checking process required for the delivering of technical assessments

Semantic Web Approach to Ease Regulation Compliance Checking in Construction Industry

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