From Standards and Regulations to Executable Rules: A Case Study in the Building Accessibility Domain

Regulatory compliance check in the building industry is a complex task that involves cross-domain national and international standards and regulations. This paper introduces a refined approach to extract SWRL rules from building accessibility regulatory texts and then to transform them into executable rules for semi-automatic compliance checking of Building Information Models. The domain ontology model is a key input to the approach and is enriched by new knowledge extracted from the regulatory text. This semantic technology enhanced rule extraction approach standardized the rule extraction process by covering the whole lifecycle from regulatory text to executable rules. It is based on the open standards and applies open source tools and thereby portable and extendable. It conforms to the open BIM principle to support knowledge sharing cross domains and disciplines. The approach is also adaptable to other types of regulatory rules in the building industry.