Towards an Ontology-based Approach for Conformance Checking Modeling in Construction

This paper gives an overview of a formal ontological approach of conformance models for regulations in Construction aiming at answering the research question: “is an IFC-represented building project compliant to a set of construction rules?” The study analyses three key subtasks: (i) transformation of the IFC of the construction project; (ii) regulations formalisation; (iii) conformance checking reasoning. While analysing the IFC model redundancy and/or insufficiency for conformance checking reasoning, we suggest an intermediate RDF-based model, semantically enriched and regulation-oriented. The regulation formalisation is studied under two viewpoints: the formalisation of paper-based regulation texts to be automatically used in reasoning and the development of the representation of ontologybased regulations. The construction rules are represented as a set of rules which premise and conclusion are RDF graphs. The conformance checking starts from the alignment of the construction project ontologies to the premise/conclusion ontologies of the construction rule. Then, the checking in construction is seen as reasoning in terms of the corresponding RDF graphs. The paper concludes with a preliminary conceptual framework based on Semantic Web technologies modeling the conformance checking problem, as well as the technical solutions for its implementation. The respective architecture and future challenges of the work are also discussed.