Ontology-Based Standardized Web Services for Context Aware Building Information Exchange and Updating
Jack C.P. Cheng, Moumita Das · 2011
Standardized web services technology has been used in the construction industry to support activities such as sensing data integration, supply chain collaboration, and performance monitoring. Currently these web services are used for exchanging messages with simple structure and small size. However, building information models often contain rich information and are huge in size. Therefore, retrieving and exchanging building information models using standardized web services technology is challenging. This paper discusses the usage of ontologies and context awareness in standardized web services technology to facilitate efficient and lightweight information retrieval and exchange. Ontologies for building information such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and aecXML have been developed for over a decade and become mature. These ontologies can be leveraged to structure the input and output messages of web services. On the other hand, context awareness not only provides data security according to user's location, time, and profile, but also enables retrieval and exchange of partial information models. This paper presents and demonstrates an ontology-based context aware web service framework that is designed for retrieval and updating of building information models.