The research and application of building information modeling (BIM) has been focused on the entire project and the complete life cycle. However, the daily routine on a construction job site has specific requirements and bears certain limitations regarding the usage of information stored in a BIM model. The limitations include scarcity of computing power and trained personnel. One of the requirements is to view a partial model instead of the original, complete model. The partial model may be defined by certain location parameters such as storey numbers and/or building grid lines. In this paper we discuss an ontology-based method to extract a partial model from a complete BIM model. The partial model, as well as the complete model, should be defined in industry foundation classes (IFC) format, which is the widely supported open standard data exchange format for BIM. Theextraction is based on an IFC-based ontology which defines the necessary building blocks of a valid IFC model and the rules of extraction. The whole process is to be implemented as a Web service allowing remote accessibility from various computing platforms. The Web service system could also be linked to other construction software applications for automating construction management functions.
Zhang and Issa (2012) use an ontology to extract specific information from a BIM-model REF .
Ontology-Based Partial Building Information Model Extraction
Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
Engineering Computer Science