Proposing a central AEC ontology that allows for domain specific extensions

In the last years, several ontologies focused on structuring domain-specific information within the scope of Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) have emerged. Several of these individual ontologies redefine core concepts of a building already specified in the publicly available ontology ersion of the ISO standardised Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema, thereby violating the W3C best practice rule of minimum redundancy. The voluminous IFC schema with origins in a closed world assumption is likewise violating this rule by redefining concepts abou time, location, units, etc. already available from other sources, and it is furthermore violating the rule of keeping ontologies simple for easy maintenance. Based on all the available ontologies, we propose a simple Building Topology Ontology (BOT) only covering the core concepts of a building, and three methods for extending this with domain-specific ontologies. This approach makes it (1) possible to work with a limited set of core building classes, and (2) extend thoses as needed towards specific domain ontologies that are in hands of business professionals or domain-specific standardisation bodies, such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), buildingSMART, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and so forth

BOT: the Building Topology Ontology of the W3C Linked Building Data Group

International audienceActors in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operation (AECOO) industry traditionally exchange building models as files. The Building Information Modelling (BIM) methodology advocates the seamless exchange of all information between related stakeholders using digital technologies. The ultimate evolution of the methodology, BIM Maturity Level 3, envisions interoperable, distributed, web-based, interdisciplinary information exchange among stakeholders across the life-cycle of buildings. The World Wide Web Consortium Linked Building Data Community Group (W3C LBD-CG) hypothesises that the Linked Data models and best practices can be leveraged to achieve this vision in modern web-based applications. In this paper, we introduce the Building Topology Ontology (BOT) as a core vocabulary to this approach. It provides a high-level description of the topology of buildings including storeys and spaces, the building elements they contain, and their web-friendly 3D models. We describe how existing applications produce and consume datasets combining BOT with other ontologies that describe product catalogues, sensor observations, or Internet of Things (IoT) devices effectively implementing BIM Maturity Level 3. We evaluate our approach by exporting and querying three real-life large building models

A novel workflow to combine BIM and Linked Data for existing buildings

Combining conventional Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools and Linked Data technologies improves the options to connect building models to external datasets. Existing workflows in this regard expect a conventional BIM model - including object’s geometry - as a starting point. This paper presents a novel, alternative workflow oriented towards existing buildings, including an initial implementation. Modeling the building topology using the BOT ontology is done first, allowing a Linked Data modeler to enrich this initial graph from the start of a project without being dependent on a BIM with (detailed) geometry. Later, a conventional BIM - including objects’ geometry - of the existing building can be made, starting from the shared building topology. At the end of this more flexible workflow, both the initial RDF graph and the BIM-based RDF graph are directly connected to each other, combining both datasets.status: publishe