Distributed Transactional Building Information Management
Seppo Törmä, Jyrki Oraskari, Nam Vu Hoang · 2012
Impressive results have been gained in the field of building information modeling ‐ most notably the standardized schema (IFC) and advanced discipline-specific design tools ‐ but the management of building information is still in its infancy. Building information is produced in a distributed and parallel fashion by different discipline experts throughout a building project. These partial models are interrelated as they describe the same building, although from different perspectives. How can the interdependencies be represented and the contents of the partial models be exchanged, combined, and modified in as ystematic manner? We propose an approach based on Linked Data :t he partial models are converted into Linked Data datasets (utilizing URIs, RDF, and OWL) and published on the Web (allowing browsing and querying with SPARQL). We describe an ongoing research project to determine the feasibility of this approach. The work is based on a IFC-to-RDF converter, and use of RDF store to maintain the resulting dataset. The research problems ‐ link-type modeling, link generation, change discovery, change management, and information scope management ‐ are described.