A Semantic Enrichment Engine for Building Information Modeling

Significant difficulties remain in exchanging information between Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exchange schema is too generic to capture the full semantic meaning needed for direct use by different construction project stakeholders' BIM tools. Although BIM standards that prescribe model view definitions (MVD) for domain-specific exchanges are under development, insufficient semantic definition of exchanges prevents achievement of the full potential of BIM through seamless interoperability. We propose an innovative approach for supplementing an IFC exchange file with semantically useful concepts inferred from the explicit and implicit information contained in the building model. The rule-sets used can easily be tailored for different domains. A prototype system was implemented and used to demonstrate semantic enrichment of precast concrete model files, adding joint and slab aggregation concepts. The tests illustrated the composition of rule-sets using topological, geometric and other generic operators that can be reused for other domains.